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THE MAN JESUS: 



a Course of lectures* 



BY 



JOHN WHITE CHADWICK, 

AUTHOR OF "THE FAITH OF REASON," "THE BIBLE OF TO-DAY, r 
"A BOOK OF POEMS," ETC., ETC. 



u His life was gentle ; and the elements 
So mixed in him, that Nature might stand up 
And say to all the world, This was a Man I n 




BOSTON: 

ROBERTS BROTHERS. 
1881. 



Copyright, 1881, 
By Roberts Brothers. 




University Press: 
John Wilson and Son, Cambridge. 



C. P. G. 

If where thou art thou knowest more than I 
Can know y amid these earthly vapors dim, 
Of that great Soul, who often, in the days 
That are no more, allured our common thought, 
And made our homeward talk grow strangely deep 
And tender, underneath the quiet stars, — 
If there thou knowest I have done him wrong, 
Failing in aught to give him reverence due, 
Thou wilt forgive ; for surely thou wilt know 
That truth is now as precious to my soul 
As in those dear and unforgotten days 
When life was sweeter than it fer can be 
Again } until again I am with thee. 



PREFACE. 



Eeligious opinion is the resultant of many 
infinitesimal shocks, and I shall not be suspected 
by any generous person of imagining that I have 
written any final word about a theme which has 
inspired hundreds and thousands of volumes and 
will doubtless inspire as many more. I have but 
endeavored, with the help of many eminent 
scholars, of whom I would name Theodor Keim 
with special admiration, to write a book which 
shall contribute something to a rational under- 
standing of the human greatness of Jesus in the 
minds of those who have not the time or oppor- 
tunity to read those voluminous writings in which 
the modern study of the life of Jesus has em- 
bodied its conjectures and results. 

Brooklyn, May 5, 1881. 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

I. Sources of Information 11 

II. The Place and Time 45 

III. Birth, Youth, and Training .... 79 

IV. Jesus as Prophet Ill 

V. Jesus as Messiah 149 

VI. The Eesurrection 187 

VII. The Deification 223 



THE MAN JESUS. 

"Our highest Orpheus walked in Judea eighteen 
hundred years ago. His sphere-melody, flowing in 
wild, native tones, took captive the ravished souls of 
men ; and, being of a truth sphere-melody, still flows 
and sounds, though now with thousand-fold accom- 
paniments and rich symphonies, through all our hearts, 
and modulates and divinely leads them." 

Sartor Eesartus. 



SOUKCES OF INFOEMATION. 



" After all that Biblical critics and antiquarian research 
have raked from the dust of antiquity in proof of the gen- 
uineness and authenticity of the books of the New Testa- 
ment, credibility still labors with the fact that the age in 
which these books were received and put in circulation was 
one in which the science of criticism as developed by the 
moderns — the science which scrutinizes statements, bal- 
ances evidence for and against, and sifts the true from the 
false — did not exist ; an age when a boundless credulity 
disposed men to believe in wonders as readily as in ordinary 
events, requiring no stronger proof in the case of the former 
than sufficed to establish the latter, namely, hearsay and 
vulgar report ; an age when literary honesty was a virtue 
almost unknown, and when, consequently, literary for- 
geries were as common as genuine productions, and tran- 
scribers of sacred books did not scruple to alter the text 
in the interest of personal views and doctrinal preposses- 
sions." 

Frederic Henry Hedge. 



THE MAN JESUS. 



I. 

SOURCES OF INFORMATION. 

IN" studying the life of any person the first ques- 
tion that presents itself, or ought to present 
itself, is one of biographical material. Neglecting 
this, the best intentions frequently come to little or 
to naught. It often happens that the material is 
not homogeneous, that the sources of information 
differ among themselves, and it becomes necessary 
that we should make, if not an absolute, at least a 
relative choice. Otherwise an element of confu- 
sion is introduced into every subsequent stage of 
our procedure. In the -case of Jesus of Nazareth 
we are bound by these conditions as unreservedly 
as in any other, if the historical importance attach- 
ing to his name does not put us under heavier bonds 
to proceed from first to last with the utmost cau- 
tion. Whatever the importance of this study, its 
interest cannot, I think, be overrated. It would 



14 THE MAN JESUS. 

argue either exceeding coarseness or dulness not 
to be profoundly interested in the actual career and 
character of one whom the most civilized portion 
of the world for sixteen hundred years has wor- 
shipped as a god, and who, whatever his original 
force, has been the most engrossing figure that has 
ever trod the stage of human history. 

Voltaire is reported as saying of Jesus, "Let 
me never hear that man's name again ; " and I am 
not unaware that there are those in this commu- 
nity who have something of the feeling which that 
petulant remark expressed. They are tired of hear- 
ing Aristides called the just. Their sense of dis- 
proportion between the person and the myth goads 
them to this extreme. But what may be natural 
to an unguarded moment ought not to be allowed to 
become a habit of the mind. Jesus is not respon- 
sible for the extravagance and absurdity of his 
mythologists. Because they have enveloped him in 
legend and fable there is all the more reason why 
we should seek to penetrate to his actual char- 
acter. We afe none of us, I hope, indifferent to 
real greatness, nor feel so rich in what we have 
already gathered of its fame, that we are not always 
more than glad to add a little to our store. The 
presumption is, that behind a myth like that of 
Jesus there is a man, and it is only honorable and 
decent for us to see whether it is so or not. Behind 
the myth of Buddha we are glad to find a man. It 



SOUKCES OF INFORMATION. 15 

speaks ill for both our science and morality if we 
are not equally glad to find one behind the myth 
of Jesus. Both science and morality demand that 
we shall approach Jesus with as little hostile bias 
as characterizes our approach to Buddha or Zoroas- 
ter or Mohammed. 

An inquiry into the sources of our information 
concerning Jesus was of comparatively small impor- 
tance so long as the New Testament was regarded 
as a miraculously inspired volume, and as such was 
considered free from any error or exaggeration. 
There was still room for study of the way in which 
the miraculous history of the New Testament joined 
on to the secular history of the times, and of the im- 
pression it made upon these times ; and within the 
limits of the New Testament there were elements 
apparently conflicting which had to be compelled 
into some show of agreement. The world has 
hardly anything to show more ingenious than some 
of the devices which were resorted to under the 
inspiration of this method. The Fourth Gospel, it 
was suggested, was supplementary to the other 
three, and all divergent accounts of an apparently 
single event were explained as so many different 
accounts of so many different events. Thus, the 
critics, if they could not wholly satisfy themselves, 
satisfied the uncritical, and do unto this day. 

But the doctrine of the New Testament's mirac- 
ulous inspiration is no longer a doctrine that can 



16 THE MAN JESUS. 

be entertained by any person who is at the same 
time honest, thoughtful, and intelligent. This is a 
frank expression ; but I am confident it is a saying 
that will stand. Omit the honesty, the intelligence, 
or the thoughtfulness, and the saying thus mutilated 
would not hold good. Taken in its entirety, its force 
cannot be broken. Show me an intelligent man who 
entertains this doctrine, and the chances are ten to 
one that he lacks either thoughtfulness or honesty. 
Show me a thoughtful man who entertains it, and 
he must be lacking either in honesty or intelligence- 
Show me an honest man who entertains it, and 
either intelligence or thoughtfulness is a missing link 
in the chain of his individual completeness. For 
every man of honesty, intelligence, and thought- 
fulness knows that the result of criticism is, that 
of the twenty-seven books of the New Testament 
the authorship of only four l is absolutely certain. 
But to elevate into the position of a supernatural 
revelation a book the authorship of six-sevenths 
of which is extremely doubtful, is manifestly an 
unwarrantable procedure. We may be tolerably 
sure of the authorship of another seventh. This is 
the extremity of critical concession. But, in order 
to maintain the supernatural inspiration of the New 
Testament, we should be certain not only of the 

1 Romans, First and Second Corinthians, and Galatians. The 
Pauline authorship of these even is denied by Bruno Bauer, a 
critic of no mean abilities. 



SOURCES OF INFORMATION. 17 

authorship of each separate book, but of the super- 
natural inspiration of each individual author. In 
fact, our certainty on the head of authorship is con- 
fined to four books out of twenty-seven; and of 
the supernatural inspiration of St. Paul, the author 
of these four, there is not a particle of proof, while 
there is abundant proof at every turn of human 
limitation. 

But books which may not wear the honors of a 
supernatural revelation may, used with sufficient 
caution, furnish us with biographical material toler- 
ably satisfactory, even where they must be regarded 
as anonymous. Whether the New Testament books 
do furnish us with such material it is the prin- 
cipal object of this morning's lecture to discover. 

But before addressing ourselves to this, let us 
inquire what intimation, if any, we have of Jesus, 
his life and teachings, beyond the confines of the 
New Testament. Let us begin upon the outmost 
verge and work our way in towards the centre. 
That is, let us first consider the heathen testimony, 
then the Jewish, then the incidental, finally the 
direct testimony of the New Testament. 

Of contemporary reference to Jesus in pagan 
writers there is none whatever. The earliest is that 
of Tacitus, after Thucydides the greatest historian 
of the ancient world. But this reference is con- 
fined to a statement of the bare fact that Jesus was 
" executed in the reign of Tiberius by the procura- 

2 



18 THE MAN JESUS. 

tor, Pontius Pilate." This was written about sev- 
enty years after the death of Jesus, at which time 
Tacitus, the wisest of his generation, regarded the 
Jews as a people " without religion/' as " haters of 
the human race," and Christianity as the meanest 
of the offshoots of Judaism, exitiabilis superstitio, 
— " a miserable superstition." Suetonius, writing of 
the Emperor Claudius near the beginning of the 
second century, has a single reference to Jesus, — 
" one Chrestos," — whom he imagines to have been 
a seditious Roman Jew, living in Eome, midway 
of the first century. And these scanty references 
to Jesus, the one so bare, the other so absurd, are 
all l that we have in pagan literature to enlighten 
us concerning the founder of a religion which in 
a little more than two centuries after the time of 
Tacitus and Suetonius became the State religion of 
the Eoman Empire. Need I remark on the incon- 
sequence of those who from this paucity of pagan 
mention infer the non-existence of Jesus ? There 
were no railroads and telegraphs in the time of Jesus 
to bind the civilized world together in a network of 
mutual appreciation. Tacitus's general ignorance of 
the Jewish people would be unpardonable in any 
modern person, but the wonder is that he set down 
correctly the circumstances of the death of Jesus. 

1 The letter of the Younger Pliny from Bithynia, 104 A. D., 
is vaguely instructive about the Christian community of that 
time, but contains nothing about Jesus. 



SOURCES OF INFORMATION. 19 

But that the writings of the Jews themselves, 
outside of the New Testament, should be as little 
fruitful of information concerning Jesus as the 
writings of Suetonius and Tacitus is more remark- 
able. The first Christian century covered the lit- 
erary activity of two Jewish writers of remarkable 
ability, Philo and Josephus. Philo died in 60, 
Josephus in 95 A. D. But Philo mentions neither 
Jesus nor the Christians, and of Josephus we are 
obliged to make substantially the same confession. 
There are two passages in popular editions of Jo- 
sephus which refer to Jesus. The less celebrated 
may possibly contain these authentic words, "James 
the brother of Jesus, called the Christ ; " although 
the fact that the passage containing these words was 
outrageously tampered "with by Christian hands 
throws doubt on even so much as I have quoted. 
The more celebrated passage reads : " At that time 
appeared a certain Jesus, a wise man, if indeed he 
may be called a man ; for he was a worker of mira- 
cles, a teacher of such men as receive the truth with 
joy, and he drew to himself many Jews and many 
also of the Greeks. This was the Christ. And 
when, at the instigation of our chief men, Pilate 
condemned him to the cross, those who had first 
loved him did not fall away. For he appeared to 
them alive again on the third day, according as the 
holy prophets had declared this and a thousand 
other wonderful things of him. To this day the 



20 THE MAN JESUS. 

sect of Christians called after him exists." This 
beautiful passage has been quoted thousands of 
times, and is still quoted as the testimony of a cul- 
tured Jew to the substantial truth of the New 
Testament. But, alas, the early Christian fathers, 
who knew the writings of Josephus well enough, 
knew nothing of this passage. When at length it 
appears in the " Antiquities," it is now in one place 
and now in another. Efforts the most heroic to 
save a part of it have proved as futile as the 
attempt to save the whole. But the significance of 
the passage cannot be overrated. It is a capital 
example of the literary ethics of the early Chris- 
tians. The original interpolator of this passage 
thought he " verily did God service " when he in- 
serted it in the " Antiquities " of the Jewish histo- 
rian. He did nothing that was not done a thousand 
times from Ezra to Augustine. Pseudonymous 
writing and interpolation were favorite methods of 
religious propagandism. 

What are we to infer from the entire silence o: 
Josephus (or almost entire, allowing the words 
" James the brother of Jesus, called the Christ/' to 
be authentic) ? Many have been the conjectures. 
But the most plausible is, that in the world- view of 
Josephus, writing fifty years after the time of Jesus, 
the Christian community was too small a dot to 
merit his consideration. 

The literature of Judaism outside of Philo and 



s 



SOURCES OF INFORMATION. 21 

Josephus is equally barren of any real information. 
The Talnmdic writings do little more than repeat 
in various forms the slander of his illegitimate birth, 
— a retort so natural to the assertion of his miracu- 
lous birth that we encounter it in the earliest writ- 
ings hostile to Christianity that have come down to 
us. Shall we be more successful if we seek for infor- 
mation concerning Jesus in Christian writings of 
the second century outside of those contained in the 
New Testament ? This literature, as preserved to 
us, is neither inconsiderable in bulk nor unimpor- 
tant, especially as admitting us to the inner life of 
the Christian community in the second century ; but 
it adds very little to our New Testament sources, — 
hardly more than a few sentences of apparent gen- 
uineness, having on themrthe stamp of Jesus' indi- 
viduality. If there is any exception to be taken 
to this statement, it must be in favor of the Gospel 
according to the Hebrews. Time was when our New 
Testament Matthew was thought to be a transla- 
tion of this, but one of the fixed facts of modern 
criticism is that our Matthew is not a translation. 
And still its relation to the Gospel according to the 
Hebrews is one of the most interesting questions 
of New Testament criticism. The agreements of the 
two are many, and where they disagree the unca- 
nonical work sometimes preserves the more reliable 
tradition. The Gospel of the Hebrews seems to 
have existed in various forms, in this respect being 



22 THE MAN JESUS. 

in no wise different perhaps from the New Testa- 
ment gospels. Whether its earliest form was the 
germ of our own Matthew, or the two branched 
from a common stock, is a dilemma which impales 
on either horn an equal number of New Testament 
scholars. This much, however, is tolerably certain : 
that throughout the second century the Gospel 
according to the Hebrews enjoyed a reputation not 
inferior to that of our New Testament gospels. The 
decline of its reputation synchronized with the 
decay of Jewish Christianity. 

The upshot of these considerations is, that we are 
thrust back on the New Testament as our only 
valid source of information concerning the life and 
character of Jesus. Josephus and other writers are 
of inestimable value as giving us the political an 
social and religious setting of his life. But fo: 
knowledge of the man Jesus, of his idea and his 
aims, and of the outward form of his career, the New 
Testament is our only hope. If this hope fails, the 
pillared firmament of his starry fame is rottenness ; 
the base of Christianity, so far as it was personal 
and individual, is built on stubble. 

Within the confines of the New Testament we 
have a great variety of literature. We have an 
extensive epistolary portion ; a book of history, the 
Acts of the Apostles ; a prophetic allegory, the Eev- 
elation of S,t. John ; and four biographies of Jesus. 

I had written to this point when my attention 



d 

> 



SOURCES OF INFORMATION. 23 

was called to the following statement of a writer in 
the New York " Tribune," the vagary of no simple- 
minded correspondent, but a statement to which 
this distinguished journal gave the weight of its 
authority : — 

" The compilation of the New Testament was the 
" work of six of the Apostles, and two of the dis- 
"ciples who attended them in their journey ings. 
" The Four Gospels were the work of men who were 
" contemporary with Christ : the first of them was 
" published a few years after his ascension, and cir- 
culated among the very people in whose midst 
" his life was passed. The Epistles were written 
" separately by five of the Apostles, from fifteen to 
" thirty-five years after the Saviour left this earth. 
" The history known as the Acts of the Apostles 
" was published about the year 65 A. D. The book 
" of Eevelation was written and made known by 
" John, one of the five above referred to, about the 
" year 96 A. D. ; and though Martin Luther, among 
* others equally eminent, doubted that John really 
" wrote it, the weight of modern critical opinion is 
" certainly in favor of his authorship." 

Were this a correct statement of the facts in the 
case, our search for valid information concerning 
the life and death of Jesus would be a nominal 
affair. But there is hardly a single sentence in this 
statement which is not outrageously and ridicu- 
lously false. It is an admirable summary of the 



24 THE MAN JESUS. 

popular traditional belief concerning the books of 
the New Testament. It is a monstrous, if not 
wicked, perversion of the results of modern scien- 
tific criticism, even where this is most conservative. 
It is safe to say that there is not a person living, 
and having any right to express an opinion on 
these subjects, who could subscribe to this state- 
ment, who would not, in fact, reject it altogether. 

To proceed for a moment to details : The book 
of Eevelation, says this statement, was written about 
96 A. D. But if there is a single fixed point in 
the New Testament chronology, it is the date of 
Eevelation, and this date is 69 A. D. Acts, says 
this statement, was published about the year 65 
A. D. About the year 125 a. d., says the intelligent 
critic. " The Epistles," says this statement, " were 
written separately by five of the Apostles, from 
fifteen to thirty-five years after the Saviour left this 
earth." From twenty to one hundred and forty 
years after the death of Jesus, says the intelligent 
critic, who at the same time reduces the number of 
Apostles who had a hand in them from five to one ; 
namely, St. Paul, to whom at the utmost eight 
Epistles are conceded of the thirteen which bear 
his superscription in the New Testaments of to-day. 
"The Eour Gospels were the work of men who 
were contemporary with Christ : the first of them 
was published a few years after his ascension, and 
circulated among the very people in whose midst 



SOURCES OF INFORMATION. 25 

his life was passed." So says the journalist. The 
intelligent critic says : Of the existence of the 
Four Gospels we learn with certainty only in the 
fourth quarter of the second century, one hundred 
and fifty years after the death of Jesus. Of their 
authorship we are entirely ignorant. The earliest, 
Matthew, cannot have received its present form 
much before the end of the first century. The 
latest, John, dates from about the year 135. Possi- 
bly from a few years earlier than this, possibly from 
a few years later. 

Such being the actual critical result as regards 
the contents of the New Testament, it is evident 
that much greater caution must be observed in the 
use of them than would be necessary if the popular 
conception corresponded at any single point with 
the reality. Certain, or tolerably so, that in the 
genuine Epistles of St. Paul we have a set of writ- 
ings belonging to a period ranging from twenty to 
thirty years after the death of Jesus, we turn to 
these with generous expectations. Surely, here if 
anywhere, we say, we shall learn something about 
Jesus that will be interesting and satisfactory. But 
we are doomed to disappointment t>nce again. Paul 
is almost absolutely silent concerning the actual 
life of Jesus. Once, and once only, does he quote 
his words. He does not make a single reference to 
any event in his whole life, save as the last supper 
is implied in his solitary quotation of his words. 



26 THE MAN JESUS. 

The Christ of Paul was not a person, but an idea. 
He took no pains to learn the facts about the indi- 
vidual Jesus. He actually boasted that the Apos- 
tles had taught him nothing. His Christ was an 
ideal conception, evolved from his own feeling and 
imagination, and taking on new powers and attri- 
butes from year to year to suit each new emergency. 
Not the life but the death and resurrection of Jesus 
are his constant theme. Nevertheless, in a general 
way, the witness of Paul to Jesus is of inestimable 
value. It is an overwhelming refutation of the 
hypothesis that the actual Jesus was next to no- 
body. Only a tremendous personal force could 
have laid hold on the imagination and the con- 
science of Paul with overmastering power. The 
sympathies and admirations of gigantic men do not 
attach themselves to men of lower stature than 
their own. 

The writings nearest the time of Jesus after thi 
Epistles of Paul are the Epistle to the Hebrews 
(certainly not Paul's) and the book of Eevelation. 
These were both written from 65 to 70 A. D. But 
they have for us no illumination. The Epistle to 
the Hebrews attenuates the personality of Jesus 
into a dogmatic cloud, less palpable, if possible, than 
the Christ of Paul. The Eevelationist is too intent 
upon the Jesus who is coming in the clouds of 
heaven to have a thought of the Jesus whom he 
had personally known. He dares not look back- 



I 



SOURCES OF INFORMATION. 27 

ward for a moment lest he should miss the first 
premonitory gleam of the approaching day of the 
Lord. The Epistles other than Paul's and the book 
of Acts are characterized by a similar paucity of 
definite information. To the Four Gospels, then, 
we are driven as our last resort. 

But here again there is an inner and an outer 
court. The inner court is that of the first three 
Gospels, called the Synoptics, because a synopsis 
can be made of their contents taken together ; the 
j outer court is that of the Fourth Gospel. Were 
. this written by John, we should be brought by it 
very near to the person of Jesus. But that it was 
not written by John may be considered as well- 
| nigh an established point in modern criticism, 
I where this is not hopelessly apologetic. It is the 
policy of the "Encyclopaedia Britannica" to put 
itself on the safe side of every doubtful question. 
Its articles are generally coextensive with the con- 
i quered ground of modern science. Now, in the 
: tenth volume of this Encyclopaedia, recently pub- 
lished, there is an article on the Four Gospels, writ- 
I ten by Dr. E. A. Abbott, an English churchman of 
i high standing and great erudition. The article is 
: eminently conservative, and assigns to the Synop- 
tics an earlier date than common, but of the claims 
of the Fourth Gospel to be the work of the Apostle 
John or a first-century work of anybody it effect- 
ually disposes. Of this Gospel, as John's, we have 



28 THE MAN JESUS. 

no mention till the second century is drawing to its 
close. Of its existence we have little if any notice 
earlier than this. But we have ample evidence 
that if it was in existence midway of the second 
century, 1 and back of this for five and twenty 
years, it was little known and less esteemed, and 
certainly was not regarded as the work of an 
Apostle. That it was meant to pass for John's 
there cannot be a doubt ; but so was the book of Dan- 
iel meant to pass for Daniel's, who had been dead 
three hundred years when it was written. To seek 
prestige for one's own thought under the cover of 
some mighty name was for hundreds of years before 
and after the time of Jesus the commonest pro- 
ceeding. It was a species of self-abnegation. The 
writer sacrificed his personal renown to some high 
cause that had enlisted his enthusiasm and de- 
manded his service. 

That one biography of a person is written subse- 
quently to another is not necessarily a circumstance 
that is prejudicial to the later work. The latest is 
frequently the best. But if it is so, it must be in 
virtue of a closer adherence to, or a more vital ap- 
preciation of, the fundamental biographical material. 
The trouble with John's Gospel is not so much that 

1 Dr. Ezra Abbot has argued laboriously that it was in exist- 
ence at this time, and used by Justin Martyr. But granting so 
much, the Johannine authorship is still almost as far removed as 



SOURCES OF INFORMATION. 29 

it was written after the others, as that in its entire 
tone and structure it is different from the others, 
and different from them in such a way that we are 
compelled to feel that we are reading no biography, 
but a magnificent theological romance, an epic 
poem of which the hero is the Logos, the incarnate 
Word. This Gospel was not written as a biogra- 
phy, but to set forth Jesus as the Logos. Every- 
thing is made subservient to this end. It is quite 
possible that it embodies^ sayings and events that 
have a traditional value over and above those which 
are freely borrowed from the Synoptists. But they 
are few and far between. The discourses of the 
Fourth Gospel are its deepest condemnation, for all 
the noble passages which they contain. The speech 
of Dr. Johnson is not so different from that of 
Robert Burns as the speech of the Fourth Gospel 
Jesus from that of the Jesus of the Synoptists. 
" Brief and concise were the sentences uttered by 
him," says Justin Martyr, — proof positive that he 
knew nothing of the Fourth Gospel, or gave it no 
heed. His words are true of Matthew, Mark, and 
Luke. They mock the endless disquisitions of 
John. In the Synoptics nothing is so characteris- 
tic of Jesus as the parables. In the Fourth Gospel 
there is not a single parable. James Freeman 
Clarke has recently suggested that Jesus spoke in 
parables to the simple Galileans, in disquisitions to 
the temple doctors of Jerusalem. But the longest 



30 



THE MAN JESUS. 



disquisitions of the Fourth Gospel are addressed, 
not to the temple doctors, but to his disciples on the 
last day of his life. Again, the framework of the 
Fourth Gospel is so different from the framework 
of the others, making his ministry three years long 
instead of one, and mainly Juclean instead of 
mainly Galilean, that we are compelled to make a 
choice. The time is short for a detailed account of 
this matter; but were it not I could, I think, con- 
vince you, as I am myself convinced, that in at- 
tempting to construct a consistent idea of the life 
and character of Jesus the Fourth Gospel must be 
counted out. Ingenuity has exhausted itself in the 
endeavor to obtain a different result, and all in 
vain. The Fourth Gospel is not less valuable on 
this account. Only its value henceforth is that of 
a contribution to our knowledge of second-century 
ideas. Every true word that it contains is just as 
true as ever. Every beautiful thought is just as 
beautiful now as before. But the character of Jesus 
gains immensely by this transferrence. He is no 
longer the scorner and hater of his own people. 
He is no longer the esoteric theosophist of an inner 
circle of disciples, praying, if not for these alone, 
for those only beyond them who shall believe on 
him through their word, and never rising into the 
invigorating atmosphere of self-forgetfulness and 
universal love. Since the sponge dipped in vinegar 
moistened the dying lips of Jesus, no such service 






SOURCES OF INFORMATION. 31 

has been rendered him as that of the critics who 
have transferred the Fourth Gospel from the prov- 
ince of biography to that of theological controversy 
and imaginative dogma. 

Of the three Gospels that still remain to us the 
relative values are still in some dispute. That we 
are certain of the authorship of any one of them 
only a very ignorant or exceedingly dogmatic per- 
son would be likely to declare. Nor of the time 
when they assumed their present shapes can we 
be more than proximately sure. "We are for the 
first time definitely aware of their existence as 
Matthew's, Mark's, and Luke's, from 170 to 180 
A. D. Nor are we aware of their existence in any 
shape or under any name at a much earlier period. 
Writing in the middle of the second century, Jus- 
tin Martyr quotes from certain "Memoirs of the 
Apostles," as he calls them, so freely that a con- 
sistent biography of Jesus might be collected from 
his quotations. But he never names the authors 
of these memoirs. His quotations from them often 
disagree with our Gospels, and seldom agree with 
them ; and if our Gospels (the Synoptics) were used 
by him, they were used in conjunction with others 
which were apparently as highly, if not more highly, 
esteemed. If we had only external evidence to 
rely upon, it would be quite impossible to predi- 
cate the existence of our Synoptic Gospels earlier 
than the middle of the second century. Later than 



32 THE MAN JESUS. 

this we cannot put them, because at least a quarter 
of a century is necessary to establish the reputation 
they enjoyed in 175-180 a. d. From various evi- 
dence we may however infer with tolerable safety 
that Matthew reached its present form near the be- 
ginning of the second century, Luke about 115 
A. D., and Mark about 120. This statement differs 
widely from the journalist's which I have quoted : 
" The Four Gospels were the work of men who were 
contemporary with Christ : the first of them was 
published a few years after his ascension, and cir- 
culated among the very people in whose midst his 
life was passed." And some of you may think my 
statement is -;so different from this that we might 
as well abandon all attempt to draw out the life 
and character of Jesus from writings so far removed 
in time from his own day, — from seventy to 
ninety years. But Eome was not built in a day, 
nor were the Synoptic Gospels any more. They 
were not made ; they grew. And they were long 
in growing. It would almost appear as if the titles 
of these Gospels, " according to Matthew," and so 
on, — according to, not by, — implied a conscious- 
ness that these writings were impersonal, that to no 
one man could be assigned their authorship. This 
is the truth concerning them. Luke, you will re- 
member, begins his Gospel, " Forasmuch as many 
have taken in hand to set forth in order a declara- 
tion of those things which are most surely believed 



SOURCES OF INFORMATION. 33 

among us ; " and the evidences are plentiful that 
the author uses these "many" freely, our own 
Matthew being among them. Everywhere in the 
Synoptics there is an effect of fragments joined 
together, not too carefully ; of different traditions ; 
of different documents freely used with little dis- 
crimination. Hence in the same Gospel different 
accounts of one and the same thing, different and 
sometimes contradictory renderings of one and the 
same saying, as where Jesus is reported to have 
said that " a prophet is" and again that " a prophet 
is not, without honor save in his own country." In 
Matthew the final editor is evidently less Jewish 
than his material, and in Luke there is a similar 
inconsistency. 

These characteristics of the Gospels which, at 
first thought, affect our valuation of them injuri- 
ously, prove, in the last analysis, exceedingly for- 
tunate. For these characteristics to develop, there 
must have been a considerable extent of time. The 
mental movement of the time was slow ; intercom- 
munication between different communities was 
precarious. And hence the fact that the Synoptics 
are aggregations proves that the process of their 
aggregation must have extended back a score or 
two of years into the first century of our era. There 
is a tradition common to them all which can be 
extracted and shown to have a rude integrity. The 
differentiation of the present Gospels from this 

3 



34 THE MAN JESUS. 

original tradition could not have been suddenly 
accomplished. It is even possible that Matthew 
arrived at a written form before the destruction of 
Jerusalem in 70 A. i>. It contains sentences that 
could not have originated after that event, and the 
crudity of the method of aggregation is evinced by 
the fact that these sentences are allowed to stand 
and bear the contradiction of events. The result 
at which we finally arrive, therefore, is this : That 
from thirty to forty years after the death of Jesus 
the tradition of his life and ministry and death had 
shaped itself into the basis of our present Gospels of 
Matthew, Mark, and Luke, The contents of this 
fundamental tradition (fundamental to our Gospels, 
but in its turn, no doubt, the result of various ac- 
cretions) — the contents of this tradition are as 
flattering to the anti-supernaturalist as he could 
reasonably expect. Accounts of miracles are here, 
even some of the most startling ; but there is not a 
hint of the miraculous birth of Jesus, nor of the 
legends of his infancy, and the tradition ends with 
the discovery that his tomb is empty, without a 
word to signalize that he was seen again by any 
woman or disciple. In this tradition the person- 
ality of Jesus is revealed in lines so firm and strong 
that the accretions of a later time add little to 
their force. The man behind the myth is there, 
no thin abstraction, but an individual with blood 
in his veins, and in his heart the love of human 
kind. 



SOURCES OF INFORMATION. 35 

I would not have you think that it is my idea 
that we should do well to reject every subsequent 
accretion to this primitive tradition. I have no 
doubt that there are sayings and events in the ac- 
cretions just as valid as those of the primitive tra- 
dition, although the tendency away from this is a 
tendency from fact to fancy. Even beyond the 
confines of the Synoptics I believe that there' are 
genuine traditions. In John the story of the woman 
taken in adultery is an interpolation. It is found in 
none of the early manuscripts, but it has the stamp 
of Jesus' individuality as the rest of the Gospel 
has not. This is the real. Gospel, and the rest is 
the interpolation. 

To extract from the Synoptics a consistent pic- 
ture of the life and character of Jesus is no simple 
task, when we consider the method of their origi- 
nation. At the very threshold of our task we 
must abandon the idea of attaining to absolute cer- 
tainty in regard to any saying or event. But we 
must remember that where memory is most relied 
upon it is most exact. We must be on our guard 
against the afterthoughts of later generations. We 
must from the consent of various traditions build 
up a standard of judgment by which we can dis- 
criminate between the actual speech or incident 
and the mythical transformation. 

Last, but not least, the question of the miracu- 
lous narratives embedded in the Gospels, even in 



36 THE MAN JESUS. 

the tradition fundamental to them all, clamors for a 
solution. But so far as we are at present concerned, 
the question is one of simple fact : Did such and 
such things happen ? This question might be an- 
swered in the affirmative in every case, and still the 
cause of theological miracle, of supernatural inter- 
ference, would not be advanced a single inch. For 
the essence of the theological miracle is the vio- 
lation of natural law. The moment the miracle 
ceases to be this, it ceases to be supernatural and 
to have any power to prove a supernatural revela- 
tion. Let the theologian concede that the events 
in question did not involve violations of law, but 
only manifestation of some higher law than any 
known, and he has given up his case. Before it. 
was discovered, the law of gravitation was a higher 
law than any known ; but it was not a whit more 
supernatural before its discovery than it was after- 
ward. A miracle in the sense of the thorough-going 
and consistent supernaturalist, the only miracle 
that can prove a revelation supernatural, is, we are 
obliged to say, impossible. We are told that to say 
this is presumptuous. How dare we put a limit to 
the power of the Eternal ? We put no limit. We 
only say that the laws of nature, as we call them, 
are so many subjective classifications of the ob- 
served facts of nature, and the moment we come 
upon a fact not included in them we are simply 
obliged to modify our hitherto unduly narrow con- 






SOURCES OF INFORMATION. 37 

ception of the laws of nature, so that they will 
include the latest fact. Professor Huxley's illus- 
tration is here absolutely perfect. " A day-fly/' he 
says, "has better grounds for calling a thunder- 
storm supernatural than has man to say that the 
most astonishing event that can be imagined is 
beyond the scope of natural causes." .Considering 
the fractional character of our experience, the pre- 
sumption is in affirming any fact to be a violation 
of natural law. 

A supernatural miracle is impossible ; but what 
of the events recorded in the New Testament, and 
commonly spoken of as miracles ? If every one of 
them could be established by sufficient evidence, 
the result would only be to widen our conception 
of natural law. But can they be established? 
There are those who argue that if any of our Gos- 
pels can be pushed back to within thirty or forty 
years of Jesus' lifetime, the reality of these events 
must be conceded. No, not if the Gospels, or their 
fundamental tradition, could be pushed back to 
within ten years of the lifetime of Jesus. Ten 
years, or even five, would be sufficient for the gen- 
eration of every miraculous story in the New Tes- 
tament, not here and now, but then and there. For 
then and there the scientific conception of nature's 
orderly procedure had not dawned upon the mind. 
Two centuries later Tertullian said, " I believe be- 
cause it is impossible." This was a favorite canon 



38 THE MAN JESUS. 

of belief for hundreds of years before and for hun- 
dreds of years after the time of Jesus. The mind 
was predisposed to belief in supernatural events, 
in prodigies and wonders. Every attempt to cut 
off the time of Jesus and his Apostles from all 
earlier and later times has proved entirely futile. 
The stream of miraculous pretension poured itself 
through his time, a flood that had been flowing for 
centuries, and would flow on for centuries to come. 
There is, indeed, much better evidence for the 
miracles recorded by St. Augustine than for any 
recorded in the New Testament. We come much 
nearer the events, and we know something of the 
narrators, where in the New Testament we know 
nothing. Never was there a place and time where 
and when stories of prodigy and miracle were more 
likely to be fashioned without any basis of reality, 
and to obtain credence without any evidence, than 
in the years immediately succeeding the lifetime 
of Jesus. Considering the place and time, the won- 
der is that the miraculous element in the New 
Testament is not much more obtrusive than it is, 
much more extravagant. 

For, coming face to face with the Synoptic mira- 
cles, the highest number that they reach is twenty 
in Matthew, nineteen in Luke, and eighteen in 
Mark. There are only eleven miracles, outside the 
birth and resurrection stories, common to Matthew* 
Mark, and Luke. It is frequently assumed that if 



SOURCES OF INFORMATION. 39 

we cannot account for the origin of the narratives 
of miracle in any other way, then we must allow 
to them a basis of miraculous fact. As if wonder- 
ful stories did not every day obtain currency in 
this humdrum modern life of ours, to account for 
whose origin is impossible ! And yet we know 
them to be false. *But it is not impossible to trace 
with tolerable assurance the development of some 
of the miraculous narratives from a non-miraculous 
beginning. There is no one theory that will account 
for all of them. The vice of criticism has been a 
contrary persuasion. Hence the mistakes of Paulus, 
Strauss, and others in pushing their favorite theories 
too far. In the Fourth Gospel almost every mira- 
cle-story is the picture of an idea; but in the Synop- 
tics, where we have growth instead of manufacture, 
it will be found that almost every miracle-story has 
a genesis and history peculiar to itself. The myth- 
ical theory of Strauss accounts for some. That is, 
the stories are reflections of similar stories in the 
Old Testament, or inferences from the Messiahship 
of Jesus. The Messiah was expected to do thus 
and so : Jesus was the Messiah : Jesus had done 
thus and so. This was the inevitable argument. 
In a mediaeval miracle-play, Adam was represented 
going across the stage, — going to he created. Now, 
a good many miracle-stories in the New Testament 
can be surprised in this pre-existent state. Thus, 
in Luke, Jesus likens the Jewish nation to an un- 



40 THE MAN JESUS. 

fruitful fig-tree, and curses it as such. This is the 
miracle of the fig-tree blasted by the curse of Jesus 
in Matthew and Mark in its pre-existent state, 
going across the New Testament stage, — going to 
be created. The feeding of the five thousand is 
very possibly a parable, — that of the sower, it may 
be, turned into a miraculous occurrence. So the 
Lazarus parable of the Third Gospel becomes the 
Lazarus miracle of the Fourth. Several other mir- 
acle-stories bear such a close relation to the words 
of Jesus, that it is difficult to resist the impression 
that they originated in symbolic utterances, — his 
own or such as were suggested by his words. 

And these various transformations cf words into 
miraculous events were made more natural and 
easy by the fact, which may freely be conceded, 
that upon a certain class of nervous diseases Jesus 
exercised a certain influence. This class of diseases 
was regarded as the result of demoniacal possession. 
Jesus himself, undoubtedly, shared in the common 
opinion as to their nature, and thus was in a posi- 
tion to affect them, which for a sceptic would have 
been impossible. It was as necessary for him to 
believe in himself as for the people to believe in 
him, ere any diseased imagination could be quieted. 
If any of you think that I am waxing superstitious, 
I will only say that Strauss concedes as much as 
this; and one can be as superstitious as Strauss 
with perfect safety. " It would have been strange, 



SOURCES OF INFORMATION. 41 

indeed," he says, " if there had been no cases in 
which the force of excited imagination, impressions 
half spiritual, half sensuous, produced either actual 
removal or temporary mitigation of the complaint." 
But cures of this sort were so far from implying any- 
thing supernatural that they were scarcely remark- 
able. The exorcism of demons was exceedingly 
common. Jesus appeals to it as proof of the va- 
lidity of his own method. He allows the success 
of the exorcism. There was no conflict here with 
modern science. For diseases of the imagination, 
to this day the most effective remedies are psycho- 
logical. Much more must it have been so in the 
time of Jesus, when all concerned were alike under 
the dominion of an appalling superstition, the belief 
in demoniacal possession. But given a few cures 
of the so-called demoniacs by Jesus, also the spir- 
itual soil and atmosphere of Palestine, and these 
cures would bring forth in a dozen or twenty years 
a crop of miracle-stories so extensive that not one 
quarter of its bulk could be husbanded within the 
limits of the New Testament. And a few cures of 
this sort, or temporary alleviations, are, I am per- 
suaded, the bottom facts which underlie the entire 
structure of the miraculous in the New Testament, 
and in Christian history. 1 

1 This is the conclusion reached by Dr. E. A. Abbott, the 
distinguished Church of England writer, of whom I have already 
spoken. See his Oxford Sermons. 



42 THE MAN JESUS. 

Such a conclusion takes nothing from the fame 
of Jesus which he cannot easily spare. And it 
takes nothing from the stock of our habitual 
ideas to which we cannot give the heartiest God- 
speed. Not faith in miracle but faith in law has 
been the inspiration of the best endeavor all the 
centuries down. Because men have believed in 
the stability of nature they have gone forward, 
when without such a belief they would have fallen 
palsied by the way. That what has been will be ; 
that the great laws will keep their trysts, with men 
forever without fail, — all science and all civiliza- 
tion rest upon this faith. The miraculous, in its 
original sense, is the wonderful, and in this sense 
— the highest possible — what are the miracles of 
law's imagined violation to the miracles of invio- 
late law ? The miraculous birth of Jesus ! As 
if every birth into this world were not a wonder 
vast enough to stir 



■*iD L 



" Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears." 

His immaculate conception ! Thank God that 
century-living slur upon the purity of all the 
mothers in the world but one is hastening to its 
doom ! The star of Bethlehem ! As if any star 
that trembles on the edge of dawn or eve, or any 
of the least in heaven, 

" when the host 
Is out, at once, to the despair of night," 



SOURCES OF INFORMATION. 43 

were not too wonderful for heart to hold ! The 
feeding of five .thousand ! The feeding of some 
fourteen hundred millions every day, and these 
but one of many hundred generations, appeals 
more powerfully to my imagination. But the res- 
urrection of Jesus from the dead, — the miracle of 
miracles ! What shall we say of this ? Say that 
nothing which deserves the name of proof can be 
anywhere found for it, and that, if it could be, 
the isolated, unrelated fact would have for us no 
instruction and no consolation, while the resur- 
rection and the life of this fair world of spring, 
after so many frozen winter days, is an unspeak- 
able wonder and delight, and a tender pledge and 
prophecy withal, that seeming death may be the 
harbinger of higher life to every human soul 

" When Winter comes, can Spring be far behind ? " 



n. 

THE PLACE AND TIME. 



" A human life, I think, should be well rooted in some 
spot of a native land, where it may get the love of tender 
kinship for the face of earth, for the labors men go forth to, 
for the sounds and accents that haunt it, for whatever will 
give that early home a familiar, unmistakable difference 
amidst the future widening of knowledge : a spot where 
the definiteness of early memories may be inwrought with 
affection, and kindly acquaintance .with all neighbors, even 
to the dogs and donkeys, may spread, not by sentimental 
effort and reflection, but as a sweet habit of the blood." 

George Eliot. 



II 

THE PLACE AND TIME. 

HOWEVEE exalted the genius of the indi- 
vidual, it is not independent of the place 
and time of its appearance among men. What- 
j ever the original organism, these determine to an 
i immense degree the outcome of the life. Shak- 
spere and Dante might have been born exactly 
as they were, in body and in brain ; but if Shak- 
I spere had been born in Florence in the twelfth 
j century, and Dante in England in the sixteenth, 
we should have had no Shakspere's plays as we 
now have them, and no Divina Commedia. And 
so, whatever personal force was lodged in Jesus, its 
manifestation was determined by his country and 
his race, and by the immediate social and political 
and religious conditions of his time. Had these 
been different, the biography of Jesus would not 
have been the same. 

Strangely enough, the native country of Jesus 
is known to us as Palestine. Strangely enough, I 
say, because this name is evidently only another 



48 THE MAN JESUS. 

form of Philistine. The most inveterate enemies 
of Israel have sealed the country with their name. 
Such is the irony of history. The geographical 
extent of modern Palestine was never for any con- 
siderable length of time under a single government. 
From the invasion, about 1280, to Saul, about 
1060 B. a, it was the battle-ground of warring 
tribes. These, forced into a single nation by Saul, 
and consolidated by David, remained a unit for 
some eighty years, and then, upon the death of 
Solomon, split asunder into ten northern and two 
southern tribes, forming the respective kingdoms 
of Judah and Israel. The northern kingdom kept 
the national name; but with the southern went 
the national genius for religion, and the hard task 
of maintaining its continuity through an immense 
variety of political change. Once again, in the 
time of the heroic Maccabees, in the second cen- 
tury b. c, the sundered parts gravitated into unity, 
or where they did not gravitate were forced into 
it, and John Hyrcanus ruled over an extent of 
country equal to that of both the northern and 
the southern kingdoms of an earlier day. But 
the condition of Judea's universal influence was 
also the condition of her political instability. So 
situated that she could diffuse her influence on 
every side, this situation made her soil the march- 
ing-ground and . camping-ground and battle-field 
of contending nations, — Assyria, Babylonia, Egypt, 






THE PLACE AND TIME. 49 

Syria, Greece, and Eome. The last, invoked as an 
ally in the second century B. a, in the first he- 
came a conqueror, Pompeius capturing the Holy 
City, and forcing his way, with quite un-Boinan 
disrespect for the religion of an alien people, into 
the holy of holies, where, to his great astonish- 
ment, he found — no image of a god ! Hence the 
inference of Tacitus that the Jews had " no relig- 
ion." Jerusalem was again besieged twenty-six 
•years later, — in the year 37 B.C.; this time by 
1 Herod the Great, a man of evil fame among both 
Jews and Christians; with good reason in the 
: former case, but with little in the latter beyond 
: his general immorality. He died four years before 
the beoinnino- of the Christian era. 1 Herod was 
an Idumean, that is, an Edomite ; and by his ac- 
cession to the throne of Judea a hundred cherished 
prophecies against the Edomites were brought to 
grief and shame. Hence, in part, the hatred of the 
Jews. But it had other grounds. The least of 
these was his many marriages and murders. His 
grinding taxation was more deeply felt, but his 
cordial relations with the Greek and Eoman hea- 
then world were his capital offence. His subjects 
saw clearly enough that he had no sympathy with 

1 Which the birth of Jesus antedates some years, — from three 
to eight. But the "slaughter of the innocents" is not thus 
made good. This legend of the Infancy is one of the most pal- 
pably absurd. 

4 



50 THE MAN JESUS. 

their religion. He might besiege their holy city 
with manifest unwillingness ; he might allow the 
sacrificial beasts to be carried into the city all 
through the siege ; he might even rebuild the tem- 
ple in a fashion to which Solomon's was cheap; 
and he might refrain from entering the sanctuary, 
which was sacred to the priests alone. Neverthe- 
less, all this was toleration. His heart was with 
the heathen and their ways. He loved their the- 
atres and games. He surrounded himself with 
their courtiers ; he cultivated their manners. The 
easy-going part of the community forgave him 
these defects, because his rule brought to them 
peace and plenty and material splendor. He an- 
swered pretty well to their idea of the Messiah. 
But the more religious hated him with perfect 
hatred. 

I should like to dwell upon the character and 
career of this man. He is one of the most dramatic 
figures in all history. Almost as cruel as David, 
almost as licentious as Solomon, he had great abil- 
ities and many good qualities. He had a genuine 
interest in the prosperity of his people, and had 
not his passion for magnificent buildings made his 
taxes so excessive, the material conditions of the 
country would have been unexampled in their pros- 
perity. But the prosperity must have been aston- 
ishing for such a drain as. his upon it to be in any 
way possible. His tragic passion for the beautiful 



THE PLACE AND TIME. 51 

Mariamne might well inspire one of the noblest 
dramas of Voltaire, and Dean Stanley thinks that 
to the passionate popular devotion to her and to 
her name we are indebted for the fact that Mary is 
the name of names in the New Testament. But 
the fascination of an individual character must not 
divert us from more general considerations. 

After much plotting and counter-plotting, much 
fighting and killing, the kingdom of Herod was 
divided into three tetrarchies, over each one of 
i which was set a son of Herod : Archelaus over that 
I comprising Judea and Samaria, Philip over the 
j upper country east of the Jordan, Herod Antipas 
■ over the lower trans-Jordanic country and Galilee. 
, Of this Herod Antipas, by no* means a bad ruler 
\ from a secular point of view, Jesus of Nazareth was 
a subject all his life long. He and Philip both ruled 
for a long period ; but Archelaus was deposed after 
I a few years, and Judea and Samaria became a prov- 
ince of Eoman Syria, governed by a procurator of 
^ the Syrian governor. From 26 to 36 A. D. the pro- 
! curator was Pontius Pilate, who little thought what 
. ignominy he was preparing for himself when he 
| good-naturedly allowed the populace to have its 
! way with a young Galilean who had mortally of- 
fended its religious sentiments. But I must not 
anticipate. 

The political divisions of the country suggest a 
method for our treatment of its physical configura- 



52 THE MAN JESUS. 

tion and general character. The political divisions 
correspond to differences of physical geography. 
Judea was a parched and arid land, as if the fierce 
heats of its religious enthusiasm had dried up the 
juices of its soil, the streams among its hills. 
Galilee was so rich and fertile that the rabbis said 
the Galilean " waded in oil," and that it was easier 
to raise a forest of olive-trees in Galilee than one 
child in Judea. Galilee is not now what it was in 
the time of Jesus. The saying is, " God made the 
country, man made the town ; " but the fact is that 
man makes and unmakes the country hardly less 
than the city. And when he unmakes it, it is a 
harder thing to build it up again than " the waste 
places of Jerusalem." The smoking ruins of a 
Boston or Chicago give place in a few years to 
a new growth of stores and houses finer than the 
old. But an agricultural district, seared and 
scraped by centuries of careless tillage or neglect, 
cannot be redeemed so quickly. This is the con- 
dition of the Galilean hills to-day. The Turk is 
everywhere the ruin of the soil. Lands which 
were the very garden of the Lord he has made 
almost as barren as the rock. And Galilee is 
no exception to the rule. 

It is a mountainous country. Hermon, in the 
extreme north, is half as high again as our Mount 
Washington ; the hills in the vicinity of Nazareth, 
about as hi^h as our Wachusett. These hills are 



THE PLACE AND TIME. 53 

natural fountains of innumerable streams, which in 
the time of Jesus made every slope and valley teem 
with vegetable life. No spot of ground, according 
to Josephus, was without an owner. The land was 
too valuable for pasturage. Tillage was universal. 
On the eastern side of northern Galilee lay the 
lake called Tiberias and Gennesareth and the Sea 
of Galilee. Men called it "the Eye of Galilee." 
It was an eye of heavenly blue, deep set in yel- 
low limestone mountains. The eastern shore was 
gloomy with basaltic cliffs. The western, especially 
the plain of Gennesareth, was simply marvellous 
in its fertility, in the abundance and variety of its 
plants and trees. The lake, which is only some 
twelve or thirteen miles long and six miles broad, 
had three large towns and many villages upon its 
shores. Its waters swarmed with fish, which, over 
and above all the demands of home consumption, 
gave employment to a host of busy fishermen and 
traffickers. The surface of the lake must have 
been almost crowded with the small craft of the 
fishermen, — the " ships " of our New Testament, 
which would be boats in a more sensible trans- 
lation. 

The evidence is abundant that the Galilee of 
Herod Antipas and Jesus was the scene of an 
intensely active, thronging, energetic life. It was 
full of towns and hamlets. Josephus enumerates 
two hundred and four townships and fifteen forti- 



54 THE MAN JESUS. 

fied places. These in one thousand square miles, 
— less than the area of Berkshire County, Massa- 
chusetts. But his estimate of a population of three 
million for this district cannot be accepted. Jose- 
phus drew a long bow sometimes for the admira- 
tion of his Boman audience. Half as many would 
have made mountainous Galilee as populous as 
level Flanders, one of the most populous districts 
in the world. But without any exaggeration the 
young eyes of Jesus must have looked out upon 
a wonderfully crowded, busy life in town and field. 
The great commercial road connecting Ptolemais 
on the sea-coast with Damascus, a road along which 
caravans were always passing east and west, right 
through the heart of Galilee, touching the lake 
country at Capernaum, — this great commercial 
road contributed immensely to the stir and bustle 
of Galilean life. It brought many foreigners into 
the country, — Phenicians, Syrians, Arabs, even 
Greeks. Moreover, it furnished Gentile employ- 
ment to hundreds of Galileans. They were camel- 
drivers, they were guides. Here was the secret 
of the dislike and pity and contempt of the Ju- 
deans of the south for the people of Galilee. They 
were too little isolated from the heathen world to 
suit their exclusive notions of unqualified purity. 
They had cities * in their midst which were pre- 
dominantly heathen in their architecture and the 

1 Csesarea Philippi, Sepphoris, Julias. 



THE PLACE AND TIME. 55 

manner of their life. But the Galileans, if not so 
exclusive as the Jews, had a patriotism of their 
own which was not less real, and they had the cour- 
age of their opinions. There were no braver men 
in Palestine. But their patriotism was more polit- 
ical than that of the south and less religious. 
What the Jew dreaded most was the defilement of 
heathenism. What the Galilean dreaded most was 
its oppression. But the Galileans were not luke- 
warm in their religiousness. They went up by 
thousands to the great feasts at Jerusalem, nearly 
a hundred miles away. Once there, their rude di- 
alect made them the laughing-stock of the metro- 
politan cockneys, but doubtless it was tit for tat. 

I must not make my picture of the Galilean life 
too charming and idyllic. From overcrowding 
of the population came frequent poverty. There 
was, too, much physical degeneracy. There was the 
restlessness which is inseparable from vivacity. 
Nervous diseases, allied with Syrian superstitions, 
produced a plentiful crop of mongrel ailments, 
half physical, half intellectual. The Galilean tem- 
perament had Celtic warmth and also Celtic heat. 
It was a temperament of sudden ebullitions, of 
action and reaction, inconstant, fickle. In a gen- 
eral way, the sincerity of our Synoptic Gospels is 
evinced by their reflection here and there of every 
trait of Galilean life and character that I have 
named. These traits may all be gathered from 



56 THE MAN JESUS. 

beyond the Gospel history. But they might be 
gathered from that history as well. 1 

Between Galilee and Judea lay the country of 
Samaria, politically a part of the province of Judea, 
spiritually abhorring this relation. The Samaria 
of Jesus' time was a district of some four hundred 
square miles. This district was hardly less fertile 
than Galilee, and was noted especially for its noble 
forests and its rich pasturage. Here too were 
" leagues of sun-illumined corn." But the country 
did not begin to be so beautiful as Galilee. Its 
mountains had not the variety of the north. As 
were the mountains so were the people, — com- 
paratively featureless, a mixed race, descended 
from Persian colonists coalescing with a remnant 
of the people left upon the soil after the first cap- 
tivity. 2 The enmity between the Jews and Sa- 
maritans was a growth of centuries. It began with 
the rupture of the kingdom on the death of Solo- 
mon, or with the causes that led to that rupture. 
It increased with the refusal of the Jews to allow 
the Samaritans to assist them in rebuilding the 
temple after the Babylonian captivity, and with 
the interference of the Samaritans to prevent the 

1 The life of Jesus was so sparingly related to the country- 
east of the Jordan that I pass it by, though it is not without 
historic interest, especially as Pella, in trans-Jordanic Galilee, 
was the retreat of nascent Christianity during the Jewish war. 

2 719 b. c. 



THE PLACE AND TIME. 57 

rebuilding. The conquest of Samaria by John 
Hyrcanus, a century and a half before the time of 
Jesus, was a fresh ground of hatred on the Sa- 
maritan side. The complacency with which the 
Samaritans accepted the rule of each new con- 
queror, except Hyrcanus, filled the Jews with 
pious indignation. They were the Swiss of Pales- 
tine; their mercenaries were here and there and 
everywhere. They were on especially good terms 
with Herod. This was the last offence before the 
birth of Jesus. The enmity thus generated and 
increased showed itself in a hundred ways. The 
New Testament is again true to the life in its re- 
flection of this enmity. Galileans going to Jeru- 
salem generally deemed it best to skirt the border 
of Samaria. There even a cup of cold water was 
denied the weary pilgrim. Upon the border of 
Samaria and Judea fight and foray were the order 
of the day. To -eat bread with a Samaritan was 
as to eat the flesh of swine. In the Fourth Gospel 
the woman of Samaria is regarded by some critics 
as Samaria itself, her five husbands typifying the 
five gods whom the Samaritans were charged with 
worshipping. Equally the Samaritans hated the 
religious pretensions of the Jews. To the punc- 
tilious formalism of the latter it was essential 
that the feasts of the new moons should be ex- 
actly observed, and signals were invented — one 
of the earliest systems of telegraphy — to inform 



58 THE MAN JESUS. 

the country round about Jerusalem. But the Sa- 
maritans maliciously confused the signals, so that 
other means of information had to be invented. 
Worst of all, the Samaritans at one time, during 
the boyhood of Jesus, just before the Feast of the 
Passover, when all the priests and sacred vessels 
had been puritied, scattered a lot of human bones 
in the courts of the temple. The celebrants had 
to be turned away and the feast put off on account 
of this act of sacrilege. Against this background 
of rage and bitterness the parable of the Good Sa- 
maritan in the New Testament is like a snow-white 
lily painted upon a canvas smeared with blood. 

The southern borders of Samaria anticipate, to 
some extent, the barrenness of Judea. This bar- 
renness was not universal. The hill-country has 
delightful slopes and valleys fanned by breezes from 
the sea, and here and there, elsewhere, there are 
oases in the harsh, arid region, which is embossed 
with naked limestone mountains, set upon flat, un- 
interesting plains. Even the valley of the Jordan 
does not belie the general character of Judea. In 
summer then, as now, its adjacent country was 
completely dried up. " The Jordan, with its acacias, 
tamarisks, and copses of willows and reeds, forms a 
green riband on a brown plain, surrounded by bar- 
ren steep slopes, bare limestone ravines, and crum- 
bling chalk-beds." x " The river tarries," says Pliny, 
1 Hausrath's New Testament Times, Vol. I. p. 34. 



THE PLACE AND TIME. 59 

" as though it unwillingly approached the abomi- 
nable sea which swallows it up and spoils its pre- 
cious waters by uniting them with its own reeking 
waves." As we approach the Dead Sea, vegetation 
entirely ceases. Bituminous springs send up their 
pitchy bubbles to the surface of the sea, and char- 
acterize the entire country round about. West of 
the sea are certain grassy plains embosomed in the 
rocky hills. These were, in Jesus' time, the fa- 
vorite haunts of the Essenes, as also was En Gedi, 
the only spot of verdure on the precipitous basaltic 
banks of the mysterious, melancholy sea whose 
waters, it is not unlikely, hide the earthquake- 
buried towns of Sodom and Gomorrah, or certain 
towns with which these names were traditionally 
associated. One may admit so much without at- 
tempting to identify any particular mass of salt or 
bitumen in the vicinity with Lot's wife, though it 
is not uncommon for people to become stationary 
by looking backward when they should be looking 
forward. 

The history of Judea is the history of its capital, 
even more than that of Greece or Italy. And, like 
the sites of Eome and Athens, — one a mere island 
in a malarious marsh, the other an inhospitable 
cliff, — the site of Jerusalem was chosen without 
any reference to its utility, except, perhaps, as a 
freebooters' stronghold. It is the most forbidding 
spot in the whole country, — a barren spur of rock 



60 THE MAN JESUS. 

upon the water-shed between the Jordan and the 
sea, twelve hours' journey from the former, eight 
from the latter. It is difficult for the imagination, 
burdened with impressions of the Jerusalem of to- 
day, — a squalid mixture of incongruous elements 
of national and religious life, buried more deeply 
under pious frauds than under the pulverized 
ruins of its former splendor, — to make real the 
city over which Jesus wept. Its general aspect 
was, perhaps, more forbidding then than it is 
now. Its triple w^alls, its frowning battlements, 
its gloomy towers, menacing every gate and an- 
gle, every possible point of attack, made it a 
fortress-city. Only as approached from the east, 
over the Mount of Olives, from which point of 
view the temple, situated high above the populous 
portions of the city, crowned the forbidding pile 
with its magnificence of golden roofs and mar- 
ble colonnades, was it inviting to the eye. So 
Jesus must have seen it when, for the first time, 
he went up with his parents to one of the great 
feasts, according to the custom of the time. 

Jerusalem was everything to Judea, and the 
temple was everything to Jerusalem. Washington 
without the Capitol would be no more insignifi- 
cant than Jerusalem would have been without the 
temple. Jerusalem was an ecclesiastical, as Wash- 
ington is a political city. But the ecclesiastics 
in that capital were much more numerous than 



THE PLACE AND TIME. 61 

the politicians in ours. Of priests alone, Jose- 
phus reckons twenty thousand, most of them 
living in the city. Add to these the swarms of 
Levites and the " scribes and Pharisees/' and you 
have a large ecclesiastical fraction of the pop- 
ulation. Still further add the Oriental pomp of 
the Herodian government, attractive even while 
repellent, the throng of courtiers and ambassadors 
from every quarter, the soldiers of the Eoman gar- 
rison clanking up and down the hilly streets and 
through the fore-court of the temple, and you can 
imagine what a magnet Jerusalem must have been 
to draw the people to itself, — not only those for 
whom its brilliant life contrasted with the average 
dreariness of Judea, but those who had the dew of 
Hermon on their pilgrim feet. The political unity 
of the nation having been broken, the unifying 
impulse of the temple was felt all the more deeply. 
Galilee and Judea might be under different gov- 
ernments, but so long as prayerful faces there, as 
here, turned temple-ward, and eager hearts yearned 
for the sacred courts, the separation of the parts 
was superficial. There was an underlying unity. 
Even when no one of the great feasts was proceed- 
ing, the temple must have presented a busy scene, 
with its motley throng of sacrificers, — women, in 
gratitude for new-born children, bringing thank- 
offerings, "a pair of turtle-doves or two young 
pigeons ; " lepers who had been healed ; the bleat- 



62 THE MAN JESUS. 

ing of the sacrificial sheep and lowing of the oxen, 
meanwhile, blending with muttered formularies of 
devotion, and evermore the altars sending up their 
whirling clouds of smoke, as if to blind the eye of 
Heaven to the sin and folly of mankind. But, 
after all, it was the various feasts that measured 
the significance of the temple-service in its rela- 
tions to the national life. At the great feasts the 
city and the surrounding villages were packed 
with visitors. Country towns at a distance from 
the city were depopulated to swell the pilgrim- 
crowd. Villages were emptied of every inhabitant, 
young or old. A comparatively modest calculation 
estimates the temporary population of Jerusalem 
and the vicinity at such times at three millions. 
A Galilean carpenter and his wife losing their boy 
in such a crowd as this might well "seek him 
sorrowing." 

But the importance of Jerusalem to the national 
life was not exhausted by the temple, its daily rit- 
ual and periodic festivals. In the time of Jesus 
the synagogue occupied a more commanding posi- 
tion in the national sentiment than the temple 
itself. That the munificence of Herod had built 
the temple infected it with a subtile taint for the 
most religious. But the synagogue was wholly 
without taint. The tradition of the synagogue was 
that of unqualified patriotism, while the tradition 
of the temple involved elements of subserviency to 



THE PLACE AND TIME. 63 

foreign rule. And the life of the synagogue culmi- 
nated in Jerusalem. The Sanhedrin, or high court 
of Jerusalem, was indeed the national synagogue, 
a heart whose pulses beat through all the land and 
sympathized with the most distant perturbations. 
Every town had its local Sanhedrin, which was a 
petty court of justice, looking to the high court in 
Jerusalem for the correct interpretation of the law. 
But the seat of justice was the synagogue. " Be- 
ware of men," said Jesus, " for they will deliver you 
up to the Sanhedrins [the local Sanhedrin is here 
intended], and they will scourge you in their syna- 
gogues." Forty stripes was a favorite punishment ; 
but Paul, as you remember, writes, " Of the Jews 
five times received I forty stripes save one." Mercy 
had dictated thirty-nine, lest, the executioner mak- 
ing a miscount, the punishment should be in excess 
of the law. But while the functions of the local 
Sanhedrin were almost purely executive, those of 
the great Sanhedrin of the capital were largely 
judicial. Capital punishment it could not execute. 
The procurator must issue the death-warrant, as in 
the case of Jesus. The great Sanhedrin was mainly 
a theological court, principally engrossed in ques- 
tions relating to the interpretation of the Mosaic 
law with reference to the temple service and Levit- 
ical cleanness, and so on. And therefore this na- 
tional Sanhedrin was much more truly central to 
the synagogue life of the nation than to the local 
Sanhedrins. 



64 THE MAN JESUS. 

The temple was in Jerusalem; the synagogue 
was omnipresent. The synagogue was the Jewish 
church or meeting-house, and there were four hun- 
dred and eighty synagogues in Jerusalem alone, 
some of them very simple, some of them costly 
buildings. In the time of Jesus every small town 
in Judea and Galilee had at least one synagogue, 
— a plain rectangular hall, with a portico " deco- 
rated with the tasteless spiral ornamentation of 
Jewish art." 1 Not only on the Sabbath, but on 
Mondays and Thursdays, the market-days of every 
week, the people flocked into the synagogue to hear 
the Scriptures read and to engage in exercises of 
devotion. These exercises, with the exposition of 
the Scriptures, were exceedingly protracted. Some- 
times debate ran high, and calls to order were as 
vociferous as in a primary meeting of to-day. It 
was the scribe, the interpreter of the law, that 
created the synagogue. But in its turn the syna- 
gogue had done much to develop the scribes into 
an influential class. These took their name, " the 
scribes/' from the fact that they only were entitled 
to make copies of the law for the use of newly estab- 
lished synagogues. But in the time of Jesus the 
scribes included the entire class of persons devoted 
to the study and the teaching of the law. The rabbi 
was a developed scribe, one who was qualified and 
ordained to be a teacher of others. His was one of 

1 Renan, Life of Jesus, Ch. VIII. 



THE PLACE AND TIME. 65 

the chief seats in the synagogue. In the syna- 
gogue, in his own house, in the chambers of the 
temple, he gathered his disciples about him. Bab- 
binism was thoroughly democratic. Any man who 
could prove himself apt at exposition was welcome 
to become a rabbi, no matter how humble his po- 
sition. It is as a rabbi that Jesus makes his first 
appearance as an independent teacher, after the 
imprisonment of John. The rabbi could not be a 
" hireling minister/' He could not teach for money. 
And therefore frequently the rabbis, even the most 
celebrated, labored with their hands. Hillel, the 
most justly celebrated of all rabbis, was a day- 
laborer. 

It must be confessed that the teachings of the 
rabbis were often wearisome and petty and inane. 
Never was such refinement on a written code as 
theirs. The details of sacrifice and ritualistic purity 
were elaborated with microscopic nicety. Eab- 
binism would have had a precept ready for every 
possible event in life. It would have left nothing 
in suspense, nothing at the mercy of individual 
judgment and conscience. Of things allowed and 
things forbidden it would have made a list that 
should be absolutely exhaustive. If a sheep fell 
into a water-tank upon the Sabbath, ^should it be 
taken out, or fed until the next day in the tank ? If 
a cow calved upon the Sabbath, should the cow be 
led to water, or should water be carried to the cow ? 

5 



66 THE MAN JESUS. 

What ought to be done, when the Passover had 
begun, if the sacrificial knife had not been properly 
placed ? Hillel was made the leader of the Great 
Sanhedrin for his conclusive answer to this impor- 
tant question. Thanks to this foolish casuistry, 
many a sensible or at least natural provision of 
the law was attenuated into the thinnest possible 
absurdity. The law forbade the cooking of a kid 
in its mothers milk. Whereupon the rabbis for- 
bade the eating of kid and milk on the same day, 
lest, by some dreadful chance, the milk should be 
that of the kid's mother, and in the stomach of the 
eater kid and milk be cooked together ! We need 
tp know all this to comprehend the force and cour- 
age of Jesus' injunction to his disciples, " Eat such 
things as are set before you." 

These illustrations might be indefinitely ex- 
tended ; but if they are amusing they are also sad. 
And it ought not to be forgotten that there was 
another side to rabbinism. It had its degrees of 
absurdity. It had also its degrees of earnestness, 
nobility, and humanity. It is not too much to say 
that every noblest saying in the New Testament 
can find a parallel in the rabbinical teachings. 
Eenan has called Hillel the teacher of Jesus, and 
though Hillel died in the year 6 A. D., when Jesus 
was about ten years old, and though Jesus had 
probably never set eyes upon him, the saying of 
Eenan has much to recommend it. For the say- 



THE PLACE AND TIME. 67 

ings of Hillel were upon every breeze that wafted 
health and joy to the young heart of Jesus. And 
if he could argue concerning the levitical purity of 
an egg laid on the Sabbath, he could also enun- 
ciate the golden rule, and many another precept full 
of ethical wisdom and humanity. " Do not believe 
in thyself," he said, "until the day of death." 
"Do not judge thy neighbor till thou hast stood 
in his place." "Whosoever does not increase in 
knowledge decreases." 

It was in their treatment of the Sabbath that 
the rabbis reached the height of the ridiculous. 
And yet they taught that danger always super- 
sedes the Sabbath. Yes, " even for the sake of the 
tiniest babe," they said it might be broken. " For 
the babe will keep many a Sabbath yet for the one 
that has been broken for it." 1 

Eabbinism did not satisfy itself with instructing 
the grown people of the nation. Its devotion to 
the children was prophetic of the educational con- 
science of to-day. " Paradise," it said, " is at the 
feet of mothers." "The world is only saved by 
the breath of the school-children." " The schools 
must not be interrupted for the rebuilding of the 
temple." 

The religious life of Palestine in the time of 
Jesus was almost universal, but it was not entirely 

1 For a compact summary of illustrations of the better teach- 
ing of the rabbis, see Emanuel Deutsch, pp. 55-58. 



68 THE MAN JESUS. 

homogeneous. Within a century the difference of 
Pharisees and Sadducees had been signalized by 
deadly animosities, for whose gratification blood 
had flowed in torrents. But in the time of Jesus 
their divergence was less absolute. They sat to- 
gether in the Sanhedrin. They had much in 
common. Perhaps the smallness of their differ- 
ence made their mutual hatred more intense. The 
origin of both Pharisees and Sadducees is exceed- 
ingly obscure. In the second century B. c, both 
parties appear upon the stage in full maturity. 
At that time the Sadducees were the priestly aris- 
tocracy, and the Pharisees were the democratic, 
patriotic advocates of religious and political exclu- 
siveness. And they were this clown to the time of 
Jesus and in his time. To identify them with the 
scribes is a mistake which is too common. The 
Pharisees were always scribes, in the inclusive sense 
of men versed in the law, but the scribes were not 
all Pharisees. In the time of Jesus the rabbis 
of the Great Sanhedrin were, for the most part, 
Sadducees. Another mistake is. in supposing that 
the Sadducees were devoted exclusively to the Law 
of the Old Testament, and were indifferent to the 
Prophets and the Writings. That they valued the 
Law above the Prophets and the Writings is evi- 
dent, but the Pharisees did the same. Still another 
mistake is the idea that the Sadducees were wholly 
averse to the traditional exposition of the Law, 



THE PLACE AND TIME. 69 

wholly confined to the original letter. They had 
and cherished a body of traditional exposition 
which they claimed to be an emanation of "the 
great synagogue/' — a fictitious claim even if the 
great synagogue itself was a reality. But what is 
true is that the Pharisees gave to the traditional 
exposition of the Scriptures a much wider scope 
than did the Sadducees. The law itself was not 
underrated. God himself was supposed to study 
it three hours a day. But the traditional exposi- 
tion was held in yet higher esteem. "The words 
of the law are weighty and light; the words of 
the scribes are all weighty," was a dictum of the 
Pharisees. The nature of this traditional exposi- 
tion we have already learned in speaking of the 
scribes. For the most part it was puerile. But 
this is not : " Beckon thyself among the op- 
pressed, not among the oppressors;" nor this, 
"When reviled, revile not again." "Bepent a 
day before thy death," said one suspicious # of 
death-bed repentances. The question, "Is life 
worth living ? " which has of late been freely agi- 
tated, convulsed the rival schools of Hillelites and 
Shammaites for years. The answer was finally, No. 
" But since man is here," the sages added, " let him 
be careful in his actions." 

The passion for Levitical purity was, however, 
the most striking characteristic of the Pharisees, 
and their discussions were most frequently upon 



70 THE MAN JESUS. 

this head. Did the flesh only of a carcass defile, 
or also the hide and the bones ? Did contact with 
Gentile books defile, or only contact with the sa- 
cred books of the Gentiles ? Which hand should 
be washed first ? Should the ablution stop at the 
wrist ? Should the hands be held up or down ? 
These refinements reached their acme in the idea 
that even the Scriptures were outwardly impure, 
because written upon animal skins. No wonder 
the Sadducees said, " The Pharisees will wash the 
face of the sun." 

The patriotism of the Pharisees was of a piece 
with this passion for Levitical purity. The Phari- 
sees were always the anti-foreign party, the native 
Judeans, so to speak, opposed in turn to every rep- 
resentative of foreign domination. It was not the 
oppression of the foreigner so much as his contact 
that made him hateful in Pharisaic eyes. The 
patriotism of the Pharisee was a corollary of his 
rejigious exclusiveness. It was not the only patri- 
otism of the time; but it was the most intense. 
For example : Pontius Pilate ordered the Eoman 
standards which bore the emperor's image to be 
carried into Jerusalem by night. Day brought the 
knowledge of their presence. Whereupon thou- 
sands flocked to Caesarea to demand of Pilate their 
withdrawal from the city. He ordered the peti- 
tioners away. They would not go. He surrounded 
them with his soldiery, and threatened to cut them 



THE PLACE AND TIME. 71 

in pieces if they did not cease from their entreaties. 
They bared their throats, and begged for death in 
preference to submission. At last, as on another 
occasion better known, the procurator consented to 
their will. This was when Jesus was about five 
and twenty. So when Caligula ordered his image 
set up in the temple, the fields were left unsown, 
while thousands went to Ptolemais and begged the 
governor Petronius to prevent the sacrilege; and 
he acceded, at the risk of his own life. The senti- 
ments implied in such terrific scenes were the inev- 
itable result of Pharisaic teaching. The leaven of 
the Pharisees may have been hypocrisy, as Jesus 
said; but only a sublime sincerity could have 
prompted men to do and dare as thousands of their 
followers did for their religion. Jesus, however, 
was not the first to charge them with hypocrisy 
and self-righteousness. Their own leaders anti- 
cipated his most drastic sayings. They distin- 
guished seven different sorts of Pharisee, — the best 
the Pharisee from love, who obeys God because he 
loves him with all his heart. 

The most absurd mistake about the Sadducees 
is the idea that they were the rationalistic party, 
and that their denial of the resurrection of the 
body was a result of their rationalism. They were 
the conservative party. They denied the resurrec- 
tion of the body because it was not a doctrine of the 
Law or the Prophets. For the same reason they 



72 THE MAN JESUS. 

denied the Pharisaic angelology. That they were 
more complacent than the Pharisees with Herod 
and the Eomans is a proof not of their progressive 
instincts, but of their general lack of earnestness. 
They were the hierarchy, — the courses of the 
priests were drawn almost entirely from their 
ranks, — and when did a priestly hierarchy ever 
do anything but succumb to temporal power, 
when by so doing it could save its own pres- 
tige or its own perquisites ? The Sadducees de- 
mand from us but little sympathy or admiration. 
Their contention with the Pharisees was largely a 
contention for their own prerogative. In order to 
exaggerate this they insisted that the Levitical 
purity of the priest was all-important. In order 
to detract from this, the Pharisees insisted that the 
Levitical purity of the vessels and the instruments 
of sacrifice was the principal thing. 

The sect or order of the Essenes is a more inter- 
esting phenomenon. Never mentioned in the New 
Testament, there are so many striking analogies 
between their thought and that of Jesus, that many 
have jumped to the conclusion that Jesus was 
himself a representative of their school. A close 
investigation is not confirmatory of this idea. Es- 
senism was Pharisaism logically carried out. In 
despair of keeping himself " unspotted from the 
world " while living in it, the Essene drew apart 
into a community of his own, in which the doctrines 



THE PLACE AND TIME. 73 

of Levitical purity were developed with unwavering 
consistency. The result was a strange admixture 
of conservative and seemingly progressive elements. 
They rejected sacrifices altogether, but in their ob- 
servance of the Sabbath there were no such strict 
constructionists elsewhere in Judea. These traits, 
apparently contradictory, sprung from a common 
root. They rejected sacrifices for fear of contract- 
ing some Levitical taint. They were vegetarians for 
the same reason. They had a passion for water 
and for light. Various washings took up no little 
of their time. There were different grades in 
the order, and for an Essene of higher grade to 
touch one of lower grade was defilement, and a 
bath was an immediate necessity. Celibacy was 
the ideal and the practice for the most part, but it 
was not universal. There was a common table 
and a common purse, but individuals lived apart 
in houses of their own. There was a time for 
everything, and everything in its time ; a place for 
everything, and everything in its place. Success- 
ful industry was as characteristic of the Essenes as 
of the Shakers of to-day. Bee-tending was their 
favorite occupation. Theirs was a peaceful, gentle, 
and affectionate life, without any freedom or spon- 
taneity, a confession of the failure of society, a 
suicidal tendency. The logical outcome of Phari- 
saism, Essenism nevertheless differed from it in 
its insistence on the inwardness of personal right- 



74 THE MAN JESUS. 

eousness. It anticipated the protest of Luther 
against Eome. If Matthew Arnold is correct in 
his interpretation, it anticipated at this point the 
central principle of Jesus, — that character does not 
depend so much on the objective rightfulness of 
actions as on their inward disposition. 

There is not a circumstance which I have so 
far named, whether of physical environment or 
political rule, whether of ecclesiastical machinery 
or religious thought, which did not have a certain 
bearing on the experience of Jesus of Nazareth, an 
influence to shape his character and determine the 
limits of his action and desire. But given every 
one of these circumstances, and to develop the 
orbit of his career would still be as impossible as 
to develop the orbit of the earth from planetary 
data, paying no attention to the sun. These cir- 
cumstances were the planets of his system, attract- 
ing and repelling him in various degrees. His 
sun, the centre of his system, was the Messianic 
idea of his nation. The orbit of his life described 
itself around that centre of intolerable heat and 
flame. This orbit had its aphelion, its point of 
farthest remove; and its perihelion, its point of 
nearest approach. The ministry of Jesus lies be- 
tween the two ; from the former to the latter was 
the direction of his inner consciousness and out- 
ward action, until his life was shrivelled in the 
consuming glare which ever lured him on. 



THE PLACE AND TIME. 75 

Few subjects have received more conscientious 
study than the Messianic hope, and now, at length, 
though much remains in doubt, a few clear out- 
lines have been well made out, which we may hope 
will not be blurred by any future investigation. 
These outlines are, however, as different as possible 
from those of the popular Christian exposition. 
The gist of this exposition is that the Messianic 
hope originated in the time of Abraham, was cher- 
ished by Moses, attained its most complete devel- 
opment in the age of the prophets, from 800 to 400 
B. C, and then retired into comparative obscurity 
for centuries, to await its consummation and fulfil- 
ment in the birth and life and death of Jesus 
Christ, Jesus the Christ, that is to say, the Anointed, 
the Messiah. Such is the popular Christian expo- 
sition, and the commentary which an intelligent and 
scientific criticism makes upon it is this : that the 
Messianic hope displayed itself most characteristi- 
cally and powerfully, not from 800 to 400 B. C, 
but from 175 B.C. to 135 a. d., and that from the 
birth of Jesus onward to the final extinction of the 
Jewish nation by the Emperor Hadrian was the 
period of its most remarkable growth. This criti- 
cism assures us that the Messianic element in the 
prophetic writings is entirely subordinate ; that 
much that is accounted Messianic is the reflection 
back upon the prophets of the Messianic ideas of 
a later time; that even when the prophets cher- 



76 THE MAN JESUS. 

ish the idea of a Messianic time, the idea of a per- 
sonal Messiah is conspicuously absent from the text. 
The first great outburst of Messianic expectation is 
illustrated by the book of Daniel, written about 165 
B. o. The crushing tyranny of the Syrian Seleuci- 
dae struck out this spark, and from it came full soon 
the flame of the revolt of the heroic Maccabees. 
With the success of this revolt and the establish- 
ing of the Maccabean kingdom the Messianic ex- 
pectation went into eclipse. It was an expectation 
that throve upon disaster and oppression, that sick- 
ened and grew pale on the rich diet of political 
success and general prosperity. Only with the en- 
feeblement of the Maccabean dynasty, and the in- 
coming of the Eoman Pompeius and the Idumean 
Herod, the hope began to gather strength and force. 
And so it happened that at the birth of Jesus and 
all through his life, and for almost exactly one hun- 
dred years after his death, the hope went on in- 
creasing in its volume and intensity. The greater 
the calamity and the more brutal the oppression, 
the higher soared this hope, and the more raptu- 
rously it sung. For proof of this we have a con- 
siderable body of literature outside of the New 
Testament. We have the book of Enoch, the 
Psalms of Solomon, the third of the Sibylline 
books, the Ascension of Moses, the book of Jubi- 
lees, the fourth book of Esdras, besides much in 
the Targums and the Talmud, that throws a flood 



THE PLACE AND TIME. 77 

of light upon this interesting and important time. 
But the New Testament is itself an ample witness 
of the same phenomena. No two books were ever 
conceived in a more similar spirit than Daniel and 
Revelation; and as the tyranny of Antiochus 
Epiphanes struck out the first, so the tyranny of 
Nero struck out the second. The Jewish hope 
of a Messiah became in the Christian the hope of 
Jesus' second coming "in the clouds of heaven 
with great power and glory." The forms taken 
upon itself through all this period by the Messianic 
hope were exceedingly diverse. The factor of a 
personal Messiah was frequently wanting alto- 
gether. But in one form or another it was omni- 
present and omnipotent. From the death of Herod, 
4 b. 0-, to the death of Bar-Cochba, 132 A. d., no 
less than fifty different enthusiasts set up as the 
Messiah, and obtained more or less following. No 
one of these attained to general recognition before 
Bar-Cochba, under whose leadership the hope was 
quenched in seas of blood. Some saw the Messiah 
even in Herod the Great ! This was the lowest 
point reached by the Messianic ideal. The Phari- 
sees, as a rule, advised patience. God knew his 
own, and he would strike the hour. The Zealots 
were much more of Luther's mind : God cannot get 
along without strong men. They did their best to 
help him, — never were men more brave, — and 
what came of it was the destruction of Jerusalem 



78 THE MAN JESUS. 

in 70 A. D., and the grinding of the ruins of the 
city and the remnant of the people into finer pow- 
der in the year 132. 

In the fierce heats of this delusive hope the an- 
cient Scriptures became fluid, and took on the shape 
of every latest expectation. Let a great soul be 
born into this perturbed and passionate circle of 
ideas and events, and he must sooner or later ori- 
ent himself, — determine his relation to this all- 
engrossing hope and expectation. He could not be 
indifferent. He could not pass it by. There was 
no orthodox standard. The mighty hope took on 
a hundred various forms. In one form or another 
the great soul must accept it, or fashion a form of 
its own out of the union of his private aspirations 
with the floating elements of psalm and prophecy 
and apocalyptic vision. There came a great soul 
into the midst of this enormous ferment of political 
and religious zeal, — Jesus of Nazareth. This prob- 
lem was for him to solve. It could not be evaded. 
And his solution of it made his life the most 
impressive tragedy which has, up to this time, irra- 
diated the great stage of history with its marvel- 
lous brightness, or shadowed it with its pathetic 
gloom. 



Ill 

BIRTH, YOUTH, AND TRAINING. 



' l I can remember, many years ago, 
A little bright-eyed school-boy, a mere stripling, 
Son of a Galilean carpenter, 
From Nazareth, I think, who came one day 
And sat here in the temple with the scribes, 
Hearing us speak, and asking many questions, 
And we were all astonished at his quickness. 
And when his mother came and said, * Behold, 
Thy father and I have sought thee, sorrowing,' 
He looked as one astonished, and made answer, 
' How is it that ye sought me ? Wist ye not 
That I must be about my father's business ? ' 
Often since then I see him here among us, 
Or dream I see him, with his upraised face 
Intent and eager, and I often wonder 
Unto what manner of manhood he hath grown ! 
Perhaps a poor mechanic, like his father, 
Lost in his little Galilean village, 
And toiling at his craft, to die unknown, 
And be no more remembered among men." 

Longfellow. 



III. 

BIRTH, YOUTH, AND TRAINING. 

HAVING completed our investigation of the 
sources of information concerning Jesus, and 
of the general place and time of his career, we now 
come to the consideration of his individual life 
and character and work. Everything connected 
with great men has interest, and stories of their 
childhood and their youth are often emphasized to 
an extent that is out of all proportion with their 
intrinsic value. Of such stories concerning the 
childhood and the yotith of Jesus a few are to be 
found in the New Testament, and many in the 
supplementary gospels, of which a great abundance 
has been preserved. But once for all, upon the 
very threshold of our task, it must be allowed that 
concerning the childhood and the youth of Jesus 
we have no reliable information. If we are to 
learn anything here, it must be in the way of cau- 
tious inference. The stories, each and all, in the 
New Testament and out of it, vanish into thin air, 
like ghosts at cock-crowing, the moment they are 

6 



82 THE MAN JESUS. 

submitted to a critical examination. They are not, 
therefore, without value and importance. If they 
tell us nothing about Jesus, they tell us much about 
the growth of his legend, of what men thought and 
said of him at various stages of this growth. This 
belongs rather to the history of Christian ideas than 
to the biography of Jesus, and therefore it is only 
incidentally for us. As far as the biography of 
Jesus is concerned, the stories of his birth and in- 
fancy and of his youth yield only a negative result. 
Let us not be disheartened upon this account. It 
was inevitable that such stories should arise. They 
have been the inspiration of a world of loveliness 
in Christian art, which has taken its subjects from 
the apocryphal writings of the Old and New Tes- 
taments to a much greater extent than from the 
canonical Scriptures. For the rest, a positive result 
is not wholly unattainable. By cautious inference 
something of fact and much of general atmosphere 
and circumstance can be obtained. Meantime the 
legends, recognized as such, please the imagination 
as much as ever, but do not compromise our faith 
in the majestic order of the world. 

So long as a great man is born, it matters little 
where he is born, or when, so that the place and 
time are suitable to his genius. And therefore we 
shall not be distressed to find that the date of 
Jesus' birth cannot be definitely fixed, and that 
his birthplace was not Bethlehem of Judea. Our 



BIRTH, YOUTH, AND TRAINING. 83 

popular chronology implies that Jesus was born 
1880 years ago last Christmas-day. But this chro- 
nology is notoriously inaccurate so far as the year 
is concerned, and arbitrary as concerns the day. 
The Christian era, that is, the dating of events from 
the birth of Jesus, was an invention of the abbot 
Dionysius in the sixth century after Christ. Before 
this time events had been dated from the found- 
ing of Eome, or from the accession of this or that 
emperor to the throne. But the investigation of 
Dionysius was conducted without any critical 
acumen. The Gospels represent Jesus as being 
born before the death of Herod; but Herod died 
four years before the beginning of our era. Luke 
associates the birth of Jesus with a certain taxing 
of Quirinius. But this taxing was six years after 
the beginning of our era. The relations of Jesus to 
John the Baptist afford somewhat more satisfactory 
data. Beckoning from these, the average of critical 
opinion gravitates to a point three or four years 
before the beginning of our era. If Jesus was born, 
as Keim and others think, before the death of 
Herod, some three or four years earlier would be 
the true date, and this year of ours (1881) would 
properly be the year 1887, 1888, or 1889. Cer- 
tainty is here impossible. It is only safe to say 
that Jesus was born from three to eight years 
before the time suggested by our popular chro- 
nology. 



84 THE MAN JESUS. 

If the year of Jesus' birth is uncertain, the day- 
is much more so. From first to last every month 
in the year has claimed the honor. April and May 
were long the favorite months, for the highly poet- 
ical but extremely uncritical reason that this was 
the period of nature's transition from barrenness to 
bloom. Moreover, the shepherds would not have 
been out upon the hills in December, — an argument 
as convincing as that of certain Eussian Zealots, 
that the world must have been made in the fall 
for the Eve-tempting apples to be ripe. A more 
convincing argument was the necessity of Chris- 
tianizing the Eoman Saturnalia, the feast of " the 
all-conquering sun," which began December 25th. 
This argument was so persuasive, that in the fourth 
century this day was generally agreed upon. And, 
certainty being impossible, what more appropriate 
than that the first day of More Light should be 
made the birthday of a new religion. " Christ 
himself/' said a perhaps over-confident preacher, 
" chose this day for his birthday upon this very 
account." Considering what Christmas is to us, 
we cannot be too glad that such a happy season 
crowns the ending year, and cheers the winter's 
barrenness with its perennial bloom. 

The place of Jesus' birth is of much more im- 
portance than the time. That he began life a year 
or two before or after the death of Herod would 
make little^difference. No more would it that he 



BIRTH, YOUTH, AND TRAINING. 85 

was born in this or that particular town of Pales- 
tine. But whether he was a Judean or a Galilean 
is an important question. Fortunately it is one to 
which a satisfactory answer can be given. Jesus 
was a Galilean, and he was born in Nazareth. For 
his birth in Bethlehem we have no evidence beyond 
the opening chapters of Matthew and Luke ; that 
is to say, no evidence at all. For these chapters 
are almost wholly mythical. Moreover, they differ 
much among themselves. From Matthew we 
should infer that Bethlehem was the parental 
home; from Luke, that the birth of Jesus there 
was on a visit to the ancestral habitat ; and this is 
plainly a device of the mythologist to reconcile the 
Bethlehemite birth with the well-known Galilean 
extraction, — a very clumsy device, the taxing of 
Quirinius having been ten years or more after 
the birth of Jesus, and the basis of his taxation 
having been the dwelling-place and civil abode. 
But the entire story of the Bethlehemite birth is a 
tissue of incongruities. How such a story arose is 
plain enough. It w T as a common belief that the 
Messiah would be born in Bethlehem. In course 
of time, Jesus having claimed to be the Messiah, 
those who acknowledged his claim argued that he 
must have been born in Bethlehem. This story is 
no part of the primitive tradition. The Gospel ac- 
cording to the Hebrews, which enjoyed at least an 
equal authority with any of our present Gospels 



86 THE MAN JESUS. 

for some centuries, omits it altogether. So does 
the second of our canonical Gospels. 

But an important part of the evidence that Jesus 
was not born in Bethlehem is the frequent testi- 
mony of the New Testament that he was born and 
lived in Nazareth. This testimony is all the more 
striking for being indirect and unconscious. And 
there was no popular belief to account for this 
testimony as to account for the Bethlehemite 
legend. The Fourth Gospel represents the people 
as missing in Jesus the Messianic sign of Bethle- 
hemite origin, — a sure indication that in the first 
quarter of the second century this legend had not 
obtained general currency. 

Jesus was born in Nazareth, a town of Galilee, 
as beautiful for situation as any town within the 
range of Galilean loveliness. It derives all its 
celebrity from • Jesus. There is no mention of it 
in the Old Testament, no mention of it in Jose- 
phus. It lies hid among the mountains, nestling 
upon the slope of one that rises more than a thou- 
sand feet above the level of the sea, from whose 
top the view, all travellers agree, is most entrancing 
in its loveliness. If ever, pondering his destiny, 
Jesus sought this mountain-top for loneliness and 
peace, the scene outspread before him might well 
have bred in him temporary forgetfulness of every- 
thing but its own beauty. Northward the poet's 
vision of an earthly paradise was a substantial fact. 



BIRTH, YOUTH, AND TRAINING. 87 

Nazareth's straggling village street and the green 
vale below it lay at his feet ; beyond the hills rolled 
on successively until the farthest broke like waves 
against the mass of Hermon's mighty bulk, its 
summit covered with everlasting snow ; and west- 
ward was the sparkle of the sea. " In a spot like 
Nazareth/' says Keim, " it is impossible to imagine 
a people spiritually destitute, if nature has a word 
to say in the development of man." 

The stability of Eastern civilization enables us 
to reproduce with tolerable precision the dwelling 
in which Jesus pf Nazareth was born, and grew 
from the pathetic helplessness of infancy into the 
world-helping strength of his maturity. Imagine a 
house of only one room, which serves for kitchen, 
living-room, and sleeping-room, and, when Joseph 
cannot work out of doors, for workshop also. Im- 
agine the furniture as simple as the house : a piece 
of matting, two or three cushions or pillows on the 
floor of earth, two or three vessels of clay, and a 
big chest which serves for table, wardrobe, and 
general receptacle. Every picture, says Euskin, 
should have " an escape into the infinite. " This 
picture has such an escape : it is by way of a 
ladder leading to the roof, where on the warmer 
nights the growing boy must many a time have 
fallen asleep, his face upturned to the star-sprinkled 
sky. 

Jesus was the son of Joseph and Mary. Any- 



88 THE MAN JESUS. 






thing to the contrary is without foundation either 
of historical evidence or moral use. The genesis of 
the story of the miraculous birth of Jesus is so 
easily accounted for without supposing any basis 
of reality, that one must be wilfully credulous to 
entertain the idea for a single moment. It is of a 
piece with various stories predicating the miracu- 
lous birth of famous persons, especially of famous 
teachers of religion. Buddha and Zoroaster share 
with Jesus in this doubtful honor. The funda- 
mental Gospel tradition is wholly innocent of any 
such idea. So, too, are the Gospels in their present 
shape, beyond the legends of the infancy. Paul is 
equally silent where he would have been voluble 
enough if he had heard or given a moment's heed 
to such a tale. No, he is contradictory rather than 
silent. For when he speaks of Jesus as " born of 
a woman," it is only the madness of dogmatic pre- 
conception that can imagine any denial of the 
human father. The expression was the current 
phrase for human generation. But we have more 
emphatic contradiction close at hand in the legends 
of the birth and infancy. Both Matthew and Luke 
deduce Jesus from David through Joseph. What 
are we to infer from this remarkable phenomenon, 
if not that these genealogies were the invention of 
a time when the miraculous birth of Jesus was an 
unheard-of fable ? Strange, do you say, that the 
compilers of Matthew and Luke did not perceive 



BIRTH, YOUTH, AND TRAINING. 89 

the incongruity between this fable and the geneal- 
ogies, and left them standing side by side ? No ; it 
is hardly strange if we consider that the literary 
productions of the time abound in just such contra- 
dictory statements. Addition, rather than erasure, 
was the favorite method of literary emendation. 
But this particular incongruity did not wait for 
modern criticism to discover it. The second cen- 
tury perceived it, and deduced the Davidic geneal- 
ogy of Jesus through Mary, in order to harmonize 
it with his miraculous birth. But in those circles 
of nascent Christianity which were the repositories 
of its most trustworthy tradition this fable found 
no credence. The strangest thing of all in this 
connection is that the Fourth Gospel, cherishing 
a conception of Jesus as the pre-existent Logos, 
nevertheless does not avail itself of the miraculous 
birth, but plainly intimates that Jesus was the son 
of Joseph in the line of human generation. 

The Davidic origin of Jesus fares no better 
under the tests of scientific criticism than his 
miraculous birth. But there is evidence, as we 
should naturally expect, that the belief in his Da- 
vidic origin had an earlier existence than the other. 
Paul doubtfully, and the writer of Eevelation less 
doubtfully, witnesses such a belief. But their 
grounds for it were probably no more critical than 
those implied in the genealogies preserved to us 
in Matthew and Luke, and these are mutually 



90 THE MAN JESUS. 

destructive. From Jesus to Abraham, Matthew 
counts forty -two and Luke seventy-seven genera- 
tions. Between David and Jesus Luke has four- 
teen more generations than Matthew. And this 
is not the worst : the descent of Jesus from David 
is traced by Luke in an entirely different line from 
that of Matthew. Luke's is the non-kingly line of 
David and Nathan. Matthew's is the kingly line 
of David and Solomon. The names throughout are 
almost entirely different. That Matthew's geneal- 
ogy is a purely arbitrary arrangement is evidenced 
from the fact that it is divided into three groups of 
fourteen each. To the exigencies of this arrange- 
ment several generations are sacrificed without 
remorse. Considering the number of Solomon's 
wives, it is not unlikely that descendants of his 
were living in the time of Jesus, but that they 
were not known as such is proved by the univer- 
sal failure to seize on any one of them and make 
a king of him at a time when Judea was so in- 
tensely eager for deliverance that the most miser- 
able pretender to Davidic origin would have been 
hailed with general acclamation. Why Jesus was 
declared to be " the son of David " is so palpably 
evident, that the foregoing considerations are a 
work of supererogation. The general expectation 
was that the Messiah would be a descendant of 
David. Therefore, the Messianic claim of Jesus 
having been acknowledged, the inference was un- 



BIRTH, YOUTH, AND TRAINING. 91 

avoidable : he must be a descendant of David. 
Hence the arbitrary patching up of genealogies to 
prove the claim. We shall waste no regrets upon 
its unsubstantial character. Strange that men 
ever thought to honor Jesus by tracing back his 
pedigree to the adulterous marriage of David with 
the wife of Uriah the Hittite ! As with the mi- 
raculous birth, so with the Davidic pedigree : the 
result of criticism is a consummation for which we 
cannot be too thankful. The wonder of any birth 
into this world is incalculably great, unspeakably 
sublime; and not the dregs of royal houses, but 
the untainted blood of farmers and mechanics, is 
best to feed the brain of a great king of thought or 
warm the heart of a great lover of mankind. 

The indignity which Christian mythology has 
done to Joseph, the father of Jesus, Jesus himself 
has recompensed to him a thousand times over, by 
naming the divine providence, and love, and pity, 
Abba, Father. Never would this name have been 
so frequently upon liis lips, as the expression of his 
highest spiritual . ideal and with such an accent of 
tenderness, if his own filial experience had not led 
him to associate with it a hundred thoughts of 
gratitude and joy. There is more direct testimony 
concerning the mother, but it is without critical 
value. But here, too, there is inferential ground 
upon which we can stand with tolerable confi- 
dence. That in his mother he saw and rever- 



92 THE MAN JESUS. 

enced "the ever womanly" is suggested by the 
exquisite regard for women which pervades like 
an aroma all his traditional speech and action in 
respect to them, — a regard which Eenan has 
smirched with sentimental imputations, the mere 
reflections of his personal taste, which find no real 
justification in the New Testament, in or between 
the lines. The home into which Jesus was born 
was childless before he came, but ultimately he 
was one of a great swarm of children. Of brothers 
there were four at least, of sisters quite as many. 
These facts but ill comport with Mary's ecclesias- 
tical reputation ; and as soon as her legend began 
to shape itself, the attempt was made to show that 
either the brothers and sisters of Jesus were the 
children of Joseph by a former marriage, or his 
cousins-german. The dogmatic animus of these 
speculations is so apparent that they deserve no 
consideration. Our respect for Mary will not be 
diminished, but enhanced, by our conviction that 
she was the mother of many children. Jesus was 
her first-born. There is some likelihood in the 
tradition that Joseph was a good deal older than 
herself, and that he died about the time when 
Jesus came to full maturity. 

Concerning the childhood and the youth of Jesus 
we have no direct testimony which will bear the 
strain of critical investigation. In Luke the si- 
lence from his birth to the baptism of John is 



BIRTH, YOUTH, AND TRAINING. 93 

broken by a charming story of his visit to Jerusa- 
lem with his parents when he was twelve years 
old. But the story has much internal incongruity, 
and is evidently the vanguard of a host of stories 
of his childhood and his youth, which have been 
preserved to us in the apocryphal gospels. In 
these stories Jesus is a worker of miracles from his 
babyhood. He deputes his father to raise a name- 
sake from the dead ; he gives a miraculous harvest 
to the poor; he widens a bedstead for his father 
by lengthening one of the cross-pieces in a miracu- 
lous manner. He makes sparrows out of clay and 
bids them fly, and they obey him. These are the 
least extravagant narrations, and they are very dif- 
ferent from the story in Luke, of his being found 
in the temple conversing with the rabbis. But 
this is found in company with them in the apoc- 
ryphal Thomas, and evidently resulted from an 
impulse common to it and them, — from a desire 
to till in the gap between the birth and the bap- 
tism of Jesus, — to make that long and painful 
silence vocal with his praise. 

Nevertheless, the story in Luke points to the 
general fact that it was customary for people from 
all parts of Palestine to go up to Jerusalem to the 
great feasts. Only the men were commanded to 
go, but the women were permitted, and children 
must be taken at the age of twelve. So that it is 
highly probable that Jesus had been up to the 



94 THE MAN JESUS. 

Holy City many times before his fatal journey in 
the last days of his life. The Holy City must have 
filled an important place in the imagination of 
every Jewish child. As Joseph bent over his 
work he must often have told the children playing 
at his feet of the temple and the other wonders he 
had seen there, and they, no doubt, out of the chips 
and shavings falling from his bench, made minia- 
ture temples and Jerusalems. And when at length 
Jesus was old enough to go up with his parents it 
must have been with a great swelling of the heart. 
The pilgrims assemble in some open place and 
start off in high spirits, the women and children 
riding upon mules, the men marching before and 
behind to protect them against robbers and Samari- 
tans. There are banners waving, and the pilgrims 
sing a " psalm of degrees," or steps, like the one 
hundred and twentieth or one hundred and thirty- 
fourth, as they wind slowly along. It is a three 
days' journey. The last night they rest in Jericho, 
and the next day go over the hills to Jerusalem, 
climbing at length the Mount of Olives, and from 
its top seeing the city, with its towers and palaces 
spread out before them, the golden spikes of the 
temple roof flashing in the sunlight. And then 
they sing : — 

" Our feet shall stand within thy gates, Jerusalem ! 
Jerusalem, the city rebuilt, 
The city that is joined together, 



BIRTH, YOUTH, AND TRAINING. 95 

Whither the tribes go up, 

The tribes of the Lord, 

According to the law of Israel. 

Pray for the peace of Jerusalem. 

They shall prosper that love thee. 

Peace be within thy walls, 

And prosperity within thy palaces." 

And singing still, the procession will go down into 
the valley through which runs the brook Kedron, 
past the Garden of Gethsemane, and under the 
great archway into the city. 

In considering the youth and training of Jesus 
here is the most essential fact of all : that his time 
and people were religious ; that religion was the 
great affair of life, the most engrossing theme; 
that temple and synagogue were the foci of the 
great ellipse described by the society into which 
Jesus of Nazareth was born, foci around which it 
swept with startling vehemence. The instincts of 
the nation were declared in almost every house- 
hold in the land. The religious instruction of 
children was regarded as a sacred trust, and was 
enforced upon their parents with continual itera- 
tion. The father, rather than the mother, was the 
acknowledged guardian of this sacred trust. But 
the mother was not counted out. " Paradise is at 
the feet of mothers," was a rabbinic saying. And 
so, no doubt, from both father and mother, Jesus, 
the growing boy, big-eyed with wonder, heard of 
Abraham. Isaac, and Jacob, of Moses and Joshua, 



96 THE MAN JESUS. 

of Joseph and Samuel and David, of Josiah and 
Ezra, of the great scribes and prophets, of the he- 
roic Maccabees, and John Hyrcanus. And he was 
taught not only the history and the legends, but 
also the law of his race : not to make fish-pools on 
the Sabbath, as he is represented doing in the Gos- 
pel of the Infancy; not to touch various things 
regarded as impure; not to eat swine's flesh; to 
dread a dead caterpillar more than a live one; 
to practise various fasts and purifications. So 
much at home ; but his parents, we may be sure, 
were not his only teachers. The village school- 
master was the hazzan, or reader of the syna- 
gogue. His teaching was little* more than the 
deaconing out of certain parts of the Old Tes- 
tament for the children to memorize. Imagine 
the young Jesus sitting cross-legged on the floor, 
reciting texts in concert with his olive-cheeked 
companions ! No critical knowledge of the Scrip- 
tures ever came to him from this teaching or the 
subsequent instruction of the village rabbis. With 
these, therefore, he accepted all the assumptions of 
the time concerning the age and authorship of the 
sacred books. He made no distinction between 
the first and second Isaiah ; for him the Law was of 
Mosaic origin, and the book of Daniel a veritable 
production of the Babylonian prophet. Greek was 
a language generally comprehensible in Galilee in 
Jesus' time, especially in such thriving centres as 



BIRTH, YOUTH, AND TRAINING. 97 

Capernaum. But that Jesus ever spoke it or read 
it we have no evidence. That his quotations from 
the Old Testament, as given in the Gospels, are 
mainly from the Septuagint or Greek translation 
of the Scriptures is frequently cited as evidence 
that he was acquainted with the Scriptures in this 
form. But the evangelists, and not Jesus, are 
responsible for the form of his quotations, and 
frequently for their substance also. He is the 
mouth-piece of their doctrine, and the form of his 
discourse reflects not so much his culture and habit 
as their own. 

What was the relation of Jesus to the rabbinical 
teaching of his time ? Eabbinical schools were com- 
mon in his day in all the larger towns of Pales- 
tine. But Nazareth was too insignificant to enjoy 
this honor, and that Jesus went beyond his native 
village to secure advantages which he could not 
find there we have no reason to suppose. On the 
contrary, we have convincing evidence that he was 
never deeply indoctrinated in the peculiar learning 
of the rabbis, — in their hair-splitting distinctions. 
It may be doubted whether any amount of their 
teaching could have made Jesus a pedant ; but it 
does not seem possible that, if he had any regular 
course of training in their schools, there could 
have been that divine simplicity and freshness in 
his words, — as of the hillside lilies, from whose 
golden cups his thought came back to him bee- 

7 



98 THE MAN JESUS. 

like, all honey-laden, — which, after all the waste 
of subsequent manipulation, is still, in the Synop- 
tic Gospels, our incomparable inheritance. That 
the teachings of Jesus are entirely free from the 
rabbinical mannerism of the time it would be idle 
to contend, and something of this may have in- 
hered in their original form ; but we have only to 
compare them in their entirety with the epistles 
of St. Paul, the superb originality of which is 
marred at every turn by the pedantic quibbles and 
conceits which were the natural result of his rab- 
binical training, to realize how different the teach- 
ings of Jesus might possibly have been had he 
been a thorough-going pupil of the rabbis. In 
that saying preserved to us in the New Testament, 
" He taught as one having authority and not as the 
scribes" we seem to have a genuine critical percep- 
tion. His was not the scholastic, the pedantic 
manner ; and the natural inference is that he was 
never in the fullest sense a scribe, a pupil of the 
rabbis in any one of their innumerable schools. 

But in the time of Jesus the rabbinic teaching 
was everywhere, like thistle-down in autumn 
weather. There was no school in Nazareth; but 
the village synagogue was there, open daily at the 
three hours of prayer, and on the Sabbath, Mon- 
days, and Thursdays, for the reading of the Scrip- 
tures by the hazzan, and its exposition by some 
local scribe or elder, or some rabbi from abroad. 






BIRTH, YOUTH, AND TRAINING. 99 

To the synagogue Jesus must have resorted with 
that frequency which was demanded by the custom 
of the time. There, many a time, he must have 
listened wearily to the long prayers of the Phari- 
sees, and seen their ostentatious charity ; also their 
scramble for the foremost seats, where they were 
likeliest to get a chance to speak. There, too, he 
must have heard the learned exposition of the law 
of ritual cleanness and Sabbatical observance ; but, 
ever and anon, amid this waste of triviality, a man- 
lier voice, speaking of " righteousness and judg- 
ment," of the coming kingdom of God, the hope 
of Israel, not to be long delayed. The great Hillel 
had become president of the Jerusalem Sanhedrin 
some twenty years before the birth of Jesus, and 
Jesus was a boy of ten or twelve when death knit 
up for him " the ravelled sleave of care/' During 
the youth and early manhood of Jesus the maxims 
of Hillel, many of them so serious, so tender, so 
humane, were travelling far and wide. These max- 
ims must have fallen on the ear of Jesus and sunk 
into his heart ; and with these, no doubt, maxims 
and ideas of the Essenes. Neighbors had gone to 
join their peaceful and strange communities by the 
Dead Sea, and had returned, perhaps, to induce 
others to unite with them in their bee-tending 
communism and their stern resolve to keep " un- 
spotted from the world." There is abundant 
evidence that the Essene phenomenon w T as an 



100 THE MAN JESUS. 

important factor in the religious development of 
Jesus. His ideas of poverty, of non-resistance, 
of marriage, took color from this soil. 

The political factor must not be overlooked. 
The political situation was a ferment of impas- 
sioned thought tending to violent action. The 
Pharisees had done their best to keep a tight rein 
upon the popular sentiment ; but this had already 
taken the bit in its teeth, and was going its own 
way. The taxing of Quirinius, with which Luke 
associates the birth of Jesus, but which really hap- 
pened when he was ten or twelve years old (in 
6 A. D.), caused an immense excitement in the 
northern provinces. One Judas of Gamala, a town 
not far from Nazareth, just over across the lake 
Tiberias, became the leader of a movement full of 
the Messianic spirit. No man should be called 
" master ; " no taxes should be paid to Eome. 
Judas himself was regarded by many as the Mes- 
siah. Thousands gathered about him, but the se- 
dition was effectually crushed by the procurator 
Coponius. The fervid patriotism which Judas had 
inherited from his father (to murder whom was 
Herod's first exploit) he, in turn, bequeathed to 
his sons, who were conspicuous in the final struggle 
of Judea with the power of Eome. This move- 
ment of Judas the Gaulonite must have been the 
home-talk and street-talk of Nazareth for months 
and vears. Nor could it have been otherwise with 



BIRTH, YOUTH, AND TRAINING. 101 

many another ebullition. Jesus was already thirty 
years of age when the attempt of Pilate to compel 
the worship of the Eoman emperor raised the blood 
of his subjects to fever-heat, while Galilee, from 
Jordan to the sea, thrilled with sympathetic horror, 
and cried, " How long ! Lord, how long ! " It 
was not possible for a man of natural sensibility 
and earnestness to tread this fiery furnace with his 
feet unscarred. To the young Jesus, these passions 
and events must have been of boundless interest. 
Many a time he must have brooded over them as 
at his bench he drove his plane in patient service 
of the needs of daily life, until the " word of the 
Lord was like a fire shut up in his bones," till 
he was " weary of forbearing," and longed to thrust 
his gleaming sickle into the whitening harvest of 
the Messianic year. 

But one thing is absolutely certain; namely, 
that Jesus did not live either a life of pedantic 
study or of persistent introspection. There is an 
expression concerning literary work and public ut- 
terance: "It smells of the lamp." The public 
utterance of Jesus had no such odor. It smelt of 
the town and field, of the wine-presses of Galilee, 
of the fish-markets of Gennesareth, — an odor 
sometimes too positive for the enjoyment of the 
dilettanteish. He was not without precedent for 
this homely speech in the rabbinical teachings of 
the time. Especially was the parable a favorite 



102 THE MAN JESUS. 

vehicle for the conveyance of religious truth. But 
the speech of Jesus is of such sort that we may be 
sure its homeliness is not a borrowed article. It 
is the speech of a man who was no dreamer, no 
recluse ; whose eyes were open to perceive a 
hundred various aspects of the busy Galilean life ; 
the children playing in the market-place, the petty 
household cares, the man who goes a-borrowing; 
whose ears were open to take in the multitudinous 
stir and hum of the lake-side and populous Caper- 
naum. The teachings of Jesus in the New Testa- 
ment have a marked individuality, and it is the 
individuality of a man whose senses were alive 
and quick to catch the purport of the outward form 
and beauty of the world, the immense variety and 
significance of human life. I do not think there 
can be any doubt of this. 

So much, for all the silence of the Gospel narra- 
tives concerning the youth and education of Jesus, 
or their questionable information, we may infer 
with tolerable certainty from the circumstances of 
the time and place on which his youth and early 
manhood fell, and from our knowledge of his sub- 
sequent career. But in the course of our investi- 
gations we have at length approached a point 
where, for the first time, Jesus emerges into the 
clear light of history. The fundamental tradition 
common to the Synoptic Gospels begins with the 
baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist. The Gos- 






BIRTH, YOUTH, AND TRAINING. 103 

pel according to the Hebrews, in this respect 
agreeing with the fundamental tradition and with 
our canonical Mark, begins abruptly at the same 
point. And for our knowledge of John the Baptist 
we are not confined to the New Testament. Jo- 
sephus, who is almost, if not absolutely, silent 
concerning Jesus, is sufficiently communicative 
concerning John. For three years Josephus was 
the disciple of his ascetic pupil, Banus, so that 
his opportunity for learning about the Baptist was 
excellent. 

" Never, believe me, 
Appear the Immortals, 
Never, alone." 

The conjunction of the lives of Jesus and the Bap- 
tist is a case in point. The world's debt to the 
Baptist it would be hard to overrate. Unkempt 
ascetic though he was, it was his voice, " crying in 
the wilderness of Jndea," that penetrated to the 
Galilean hills and to the carpenter's shop of Jesus, 
and lured him to the Jordan's side, there to arrive 
at length at a distinct self-consciousness, and enter 
on that brief career which has been the acknowl- 
edged inspiration — too little actual — of more 
than eighteen hundred years. 

The account of John the Baptist's birth and par- 
entage, as given in the Third Gospel, is a figment 
of devout imagination, completely self-destructive 
from the number and extent of its internal incon- 



104 THE MAN JESUS. 

gruities. We have no reason to doubt that he was 
a Judean, and that he had served a long appren- 
ticeship of ascetic solitude before he assumed the 
double role of prophet and forerunner of the king- 
dom of heaven. The scene of his appearance, the 
wilderness of Judea in the immediate vicinity of 
the Dead Sea, was favorable to the ascetic life, for 
it was exceedingly barren and unlovely. Here the 
Essenes had established themselves. John's local 
nearness to them, and the common fact of an 
ascetic life, have suggested to many semi-critical 
persons the idea that John himself was an Essene. 
But, in truth, his asceticism was very different 
from theirs, and his attitude was much more indi- 
vidual and spontaneous. His baptism was as dif- 
ferent as possible from their ablutions. These 
were continually renewed in a vain struggle after 
a perfect ceremonial cleanness. The baptism was 
once for all, and was purely symbolic. Apparently 
it was his own invention, for the baptism of Jewish 
proselytes was more of the nature of a ceremonial 
ablution, and does not appear to have come into 
use until a later time. John had no Pharisaic or 
Essenic horror of ceremonial uncleanness. He min- 
gled freely with the vilest outcasts of the land. 
He was an anachronism in no small degree. His 
character was that of a prophet of the style of 
Amos and Hosea. There was something imitative 
in the coarseness of his dress. It was a common 



BIRTH, YOUTH, AND TRAINING. 105 

notion that Elijah the prophet would reappear as 
herald of the Messianic time. The aim of John 
the Baptist seems to have been to make himself a 
kind of Elijah Many accepted him as the ancient 
prophet, risen from the dead. Others hailed him 
as the Messiah. But for this idea he was not in 
the least responsible, and only moderately for the 
other. His one idea was that the Messianic king- 
dom was at hand, and, seeing that no Elijah was 
forthcoming to proclaim the fact, he stepped into 
the vacant place. And he was worthy of such 
great election. Since the captivity, no voice so 
thrilling as his own had pierced the conscience of 
the nation to the quick. " Bepent, for the king- 
dom of heaven is at hand ! " The message fell on 
ears attuned to it by years of sufferiug and humil- 
iation. The priests and rabbis sneered at him, but 
the flood of popular enthusiasm swept even these, 
in many instances, along with it into his presence, 
where they quailed before the majesty of his de- 
nunciation. Thousands, from every part of Pal- 
estine, came to his baptism, and one day, with 
others from the North, a man of Nazareth, Jesus 
by name, pressed in among the Jordan's bending 
reeds to hear the voice whose echoes had pene- 
trated to his Galilean home and drowned the noise 
of saw and hammer with their importunate appeal 
to his religious consciousness. 

The effect upon Jesus of the Baptist's personal- 



106 THE MAN JESUS. 

ity must have been impressive, for he received his 
baptism and enrolled himself as one of his disci- 
ples. No fact in all the gospel history is more 
substantial than this, and it a fact that is full of 
deep significance. At the same time it is a fact 
that has given the apologists and theologians no 
end of trouble and anxiety. For the baptism of 
John was a baptism of repentance, and necessitated 
a confession of sin. But repentance and confession 
of sin are ideas which have long been entirely for- 
eign to the ecclesiastical idea of Jesus. Of course 
they are entirely foreign to the idea that Jesus was 
the infinite God ; and even the humanitarian, when 
he has given up every other trait that is not agree- 
able to the pure humanity of Jesus, often clings to 
the dogma of his sinlessness with passionate devo- 
tion. Even within the limits of the New Testament 
we see the dawn of this far-reaching tendency. * I 
have need to be baptized of thee," says John, " and 
comest thou to me ? " And Jesus, answering, said 
unto him, " Suffer it to be so now, for thus it be- 
cometh us to fulfil all ceremonies." 1 Thus to make 
it appear that Jesus had no need of baptism, he is 
charged with miserable time-serving. Surely the 
loss is greater than the gain. And in the Gospel 
according to the Hebrews Jesus is made to say, 
* What sin have I committed that I should go and 

1 Our present version says "righteousness," but "ceremonial 
righteousness" is intended. 



BIRTH, YOUTH, AND TRAINING. 107 

be baptized of him ? " Nevertheless he goes, to 
please his mother and his brethren ! In Matthew 
the device is dishonesty; here it is weak good- 
nature ; and there is little room for choice. Even 
so great a critic as Keim pleads that the baptism 
of Jesus was peculiar to himself, that there was a 
private understanding between him and the Bap- 
tist that no repentance was implied in the transac- 
tion, there being nothing of which Jesus could 
repent ! How much more honorable and manly 
is the proceeding of Strauss, who says, " Even the 
best and purest of mankind has ever many sins to 
accuse himself of, much remissness, much precipita- 
tion; moreover, as the individual becomes morally 
purified, the moral feeling itself is more sensitive 
of the slightest impurity of moral motives, of the 
slightest deviation from the moral ideal.' , It is 
this honesty and manliness of Strauss, and not the 
quibbling of Keim, or the assumptions of theology, 
that Jesus himself endorses when he says to the 
young man who calls him " Good Master," " Why 
callest thou me good ? There is one only who is 
good, and that is God." There is not a particle of 
reason for supposing that the baptism of Jesus by 
John was in any respect different from that of any 
other person. It was a baptism of repentance. It 
was a confession of unsatisfied ideals. An impreg- 
nable fact, it marks the purely human conscious- 
ness of Jesus up to this date ; that as yet he had 



108 THE MAN JESUS. 

no other thought of himself than as a man among 
men. But in the narratives of the event we find 
the germ of an immense dogmatic development, of 
which the miraculous birth of Mary, the mother of 
Jesus, is so far the highest term. The story of the 
baptism in Matthew represents a much earlier 
stage of the legend of Jesus than the story of his 
miraculous birth in the preceding chapter. The 
Spirit descends on Jesus, making him the Messiah 
after his baptism. Surely a superfluous business if 
Jesus had been bom of the Spirit, if he was the 
miraculous Son of God, if he was — forgive such 
blasphemy — himself the Almighty ! 

The relations of Jesus to the Baptist, as related 
in the New Testament, reflect at every turn the 
dogmatic conceptions of the growing creed of 
Christianity. The cousinship between John and 
Jesus is a single instance of a mania which was 
not satisfied until it had affirmed a blood relation- 
ship between all the principal characters of the 
gospel history. What is likeliest is that the two 
had never seen each other till they met as master 
and disciple on the banks of the Jordan. So far 
was John from recognizing Jesus as the Messiah, 
that it may be doubted whether the Messianic 
kingdom of John's expectation involved the idea 
of a personal Messiah, and it is certain that Jesus 
himself did not at this time recognize himself as 
a lie that should come." What is likeliest is that 



BIRTH, YOUTH, AND TRAINING. 109 

Jesus sought the baptism of John out of dissatis- 
faction with the dominant religion of the time, and 
out of sympathy with one who openly proclaimed 
what his own heart already prophesied, — "The 
kingdom of heaven is at hand ! " If such an act 
implied repentance and confession of wrong-doing, 
Jesus, however clean and honorable had been his 
life, was not so miserably self-righteous as to hesi- 
tate a moment upon this account. 

That the religious consciousness of Jesus was rap- 
idly matured under the influence of John's impas- 
sioned utterance we have every reason to believe. 
But this increasing maturity brought an increas- 
ing sense of difference. Even if the ministry of 
John had continued indefinitely it may be doubted 
whether Jesus would long have reckoned him- 
self among his disciples. But the arrest of John 
by Herod Antipas saved him the pain of setting 
up a standard of his own while John's was still 
upon the field. With the arrest of John began the 
special ministry of Jesus. He was already nearly 
forty years of age. One glorious year of hope and 
high resolve, and then the shadow of doom, and 
then — the doom. How wonderful it is that from 
a period of activity so brief, and so secluded from 
the self-conscious world, such vast results should 
have proceeded ! 

I have read or heard somewhere of a remarkable 
Indian plant or tree which grows, isolated from 



110 THE MAN JESUS. 

others, to a great height, throwing out few, if any, 
lateral branches, but suddenly, at the very top, 
bursting into a single flower of marvellous bril- 
liancy and beauty, and with a fragrance that en- 
chants the sense with an unspeakable delight. 
And then — it dies ! It is a parable of the life of 
Jesus. Year after year it grew in silence and ob- 
scurity, sending no lateral branches, that we know 
of, out into the sunny Galilean air ; but suddenly 
its top, as if dew-sprinkled with the baptism of 
John, as if expanded by the fierce heats of a na- 
tion's patriotic and religious zeal, burst into a flower 
whose beauty and whose fragrance have enriched 
whole centuries of time. But as we may be sure 
that all that patient waiting, silent growing, of the 
Indian tree were necessary to its one consummate 
flower, we may be equally sure that all the patient 
waiting, silent growth, of Jesus were but the need- 
ful preparation for his single year of active service 
among men, a flower whose fragrance, even to this 
day, enriches every wind that blows. 



IV. 



JESUS AS PEOPHET. 



" At first they knew him only as a village enthusiast, a 
Galilean teacher, at best a rabbi, like other interpreters of 
the Law, one of the school, perhaps, of Rabbi Hillel or 
Rabbi Simeon, like them setting the weightier matters of 
justice and mercy above the mint, anise, and cumin of cur- 
rent exposition. For a background to the understanding of 
his discourses, one should know something of the wonderful, 
well-meaning pedantry of the rabbinical interpreters, and 
something, too, of the genuine and wholesome ethics which 
the better sort, Hillel at their head, had tried to engraft 
upon it." 

Joseph Henry Allen. 



IV. 

JESUS AS PROPHET. 

r MHE relations of Jesus to John the Baptist are 
JL full of uncertainty, hopelessly so if we at- 
tach any importance to the representations of 
the Fourth Gospel. In Matthew the story of the 
temptation follows immediately upon the story of 
the baptism. It is just possible that this story 
contains so much of truth : that Jesus, as was cus- 
tomary among the prophets of his nation, retired 
into the wilderness to nurse the flame of his resolve 
and deepen his religious consecration. But such 
an act supposes a more special task than he had 
yet assumed, and a different spirit from that in 
which shortly afterward he entered on his proper 
work. The general framework of the story is 
purely symbolic, and appears at this stage of the 
narration only in accordance with the erroneous 
supposition that the baptism of Jesus was the be- 
ginning of his Messianic career. This was still 
far in the future, and the period of inward strug- 
gle, which must have preceded rather than fol- 

8 



114 THE MAN JESUS. 

lowed his distinct avowal of his Messiahship, is 
but rudely symbolized in this superstitious story, 
which, nevertheless, is not without a certain dig- 
nity and charm. 

The baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist was 
the baptism of a disciple by the prophet of the 
kingdom of heaven. Those baptized by John, 
for the most part, returned after their baptism to 
their usual vocations; some of them to await 
with breathless interest the great day of Jehovah, 
and others to relapse into the stupor from which 
the trumpet-tones of the ascetic prophet had roused 
them for a moment. Still others, it is every way 
probable, tarried in the vicinity of the Jordan. 
They could not hear too often the Baptist's " sure 
word of prophecy." It sustained their wavering 
hearts; it deepened their religious consciousness. 
Among those who lingered thus with John, we 
may assign a place to Jesus with some confidence. 
The account of the relations of the two is every- 
where shadow and not substance, but it is a 
shadow of such dimensions and such density that 
it implies a relation between the two more inti- 
mate and more protracted than the average rela- 
tion between the Baptist and his disciples. And 
it may even be that Jesus was still in company with 
John when the arrest of the latter by Antipas 
brought his public career to a sudden termination. 
The arrest of John is attributed in the New Testa- 



JESUS AS PROPHET. 115 

ment to his rebuke of Antipas for his adulterous 
marriage with his niece Herodias. Herodias's first 
husband was her uncle Herod, a son of Mariamne, 
whom his father, Herod the Great, had disinher- 
ited. Desiring a royal husband, she forsook her 
uncle Herod for her uncle Antipas, who had simul- 
taneously wearied of his Arabian wife. It is not 
likely, however, that this dramatic situation, sure 
to attract the Evangelist, had anything to do with 
John's imprisonment. But Antipas felt the waves 
of popular enthusiasm beating against the bases of 
his throne ; his recollection was still vivid of the 
insurrection of Judas the Gaulonite, and he could 
not be expected to distinguish between the spirit 
of Judas and that of John. Nor is it unlikely 
that the movement of John was rapidly assuming 
a political character. Such was the tendency of 
every Messianic movement. 

Whatever the motive, it is certain that John 
was thrown into prison. His movement was not 
wholly extinguished by this circumstance. The 
movement of Jesus gathered up a considerable por- 
tion of its energy into itself, but a certain remain- 
der long maintained a parallel existence ; even into 
the second century, and later, when it had still 
energy enough to interpolate Josephus in behalf of 
John, as, further on, the Christians were impelled 
to do in behalf of Jesus. 

With the imprisonment of John the Baptist be- 



116 THE MAN JESUS. 

gins the independent ministry of Jesus. Possibly 
the method of John had already impressed Jesus 
as too harsh, and thoughts of establishing a min- 
istry parallel to John's may have occurred to him. 
But he was saved the painfulness of doing this by 
the event of John's imprisonment. Henceforth 
there was an end of doubt and hesitation. If Je- 
sus was by the Jordan at this time, he returned at 
once to Galilee, and there took up the herald-cry 
of John, — the same, but with an accent of divin- 
er pity and more perfect trust : " The kingdom 
of heaven is at hand." 

This was in A. D. 34, 1 and in the early spring. 
The entire activity of Jesus was concentrated 
within the limits of a single year. This is not the 
traditional idea which is derived from the Fourth 
Gospel. According to this idea, the ministry of 
Jesus extended over three years. The various 
feasts which Jesus is said to have attended at Je- 
rusalem carry this implication. And it has been 
argued that certain expressions and omissions in 
the Synoptists suggest the longer term. But upon 
close inspection the one year of the Synoptists 
proves to be fully adequate to all the conditions 
of the problem, while the three years of John land 
us amid a host of incongruities. The Jesus of 
John is always appearing and vanishing, and flit- 
ting back and forth between Jerusalem and Galilee 

1 I follow the chronology of Keim as the most satisfactory. 



JESUS AS PROPHET. 117 

in a vague and purposeless manner, entirely suit- 
able to the Logos-phantom of this Gospel, but 
entirely at variance with the human personality of 
Jesus. 

Considering the briefness of his activity, we 
have no reason to complain of the amount of our 
traditional information. The amount is remark- 
ably generous, and is a decisive proof that Jesus 
must have made a profound impression. On no 
other supposition is it possible to account for so 
many sentences and parables that have the impress 
of his individuality. There is much here that Je- 
sus never said. Invention and distortion have 
contributed their respective quotas of pseudo-say- 
ings ; but, when due allowance has been made for 
all of this, a nucleus remains of which the individ- 
uality and force and beauty cannot be impeached 
by any reasonable person. An unfavorable verdict 
here would only be the critic's condemnation. 

In the career of Jesus a few important points 
emerge with absolute clearness, but the utmost 
ingenuity and conscientiousness combined are un- 
equal to the task of determining the order of the 
various events and sayings of the New Testament 
narrations. The order observed in the New Testa- 
ment is oftener misleading than instructive. Mat- 
thew is more trustworthy than Luke in general, 
but even Matthew's arrangement of the discourses 
and events is arbitrary in nine cases out of ten. 



118 THE MAN JESUS. 

Matthew is largely made up of a series of me- 
chanical groups. The sententious teachings are 
massed ; the miracles are massed ; the parables are 
massed; the conflicts are massed. This principle 
is everywhere apparent. " Birds of a feather flock 
together." Sayings that must have originated at 
different and even widely separated times are 
forced into an arbitrary juxtaposition. From the 
standpoint of the average Christian dogmatist, 
which assumes that there was no development in 
the ideas of Jesus, we have here an inextricable 
snarl ; but once allow the hypothesis of a devel- 
opment on the part of Jesus, and that what would 
be a progressive series in any other life might 
have been the same in this, and immediately we 
have a general order, into which each particu- 
lar event and saying cannot be set exactly, but 
into which certain groups and stages of idea and 
action fall with such positive alacrity as is of 
itself quite reassuring. Nor is it a mere fancy 
that the order thus conceived derives some further 
validity from the fact that it tallies with the 
procession of the seasons and the flowers and 
fruits throughout the year of Jesus' ministry. In 
such vital relations was the mind of Jesus with 
the spectacle of nature, and the homely tasks of 
husbandmen and vintners, that his words contin- 
ually took color from this spectacle, reflected its 
various changes and the corresponding changes in 



JESUS AS PROPHET. 119 

the labors of his countrymen in town and field. 
This is a pleasant thought, and it has a basis of 
reality. 

Nothing could be simpler than the outlines of 
Jesus' ministry as revealed in the Synoptic Gos- 
pels. It was a Galilean idyl of some months' du- 
ration, overclouded more and more by conflicts 
with the ecclesiastical powers, developing in Jesus 
an ever-growing sense of the importance of his 
mission and his Messianic office. To the idyl a 
tragedy succeeded, for whose enactment only a 
few weeks were necessary. This tragedy will be 
the subject of my next discourse. My concern 
this morning is wholly with the Galilean idyl, 
with the period of eager hope and joyful expecta- 
tion, involved in an inevitable conflict more and 
more, but tending to an ever higher exaltation, 
a self-assertion ever more courageous and pro- 
found. 

It is the idea of Eenan that the ministiy of Je- 
sus began in private circles and gradually widened. 
This was the method of Mohammed, without any 
doubt; but not without forcing the note can it 
be made to appear that the initiative of Jesus was 
of this sort. From the moment of John's death 
Jesus must have been something more than a 
dealer in maxims, however lofty, unrelated to a 
great leading idea. He speaks of himself and he 
is often spoken of as a scribe or rabbi, and there 



120 THE MAN JESUS. 

was this aspect to his life throughout the Galilean 
period. The teacher in him was a much more im- 
portant factor than in John the Baptist, to whom 
nothing of the manner of the scribe or rabbi per- 
tained. Nevertheless this factor was in such com- 
plete subordination to another and a higher, that 
in his total manifestation, equally with John the 
Baptist, he was a prophet, different from and yet of 
the same order with the ancient prophets of Israel. 
More of a scribe and rabbi than John, he was not 
less a prophet; and it was as a prophet that he 
entered on his independent ministry. It was not 
as the Messiah whom John had heralded (if he had 
heralded any personal Messiah) ; it was as another 
herald-prophet of the kingdom of God. The idea 
that he was himself the central figure of this king- 
dom was not a part of his original outfit. He as- 
sumed the role of John. His watchword was the 
same, — " The kingdom of heaven is at hand,'' — 
and when he sent out his disciples this was the 
message which he charged them to deliver. Noth- 
ing was more central to the Messianic thought than 
the idea that with the appearance of the Messiah 
the kingdom of heaven was established not only 
de jure but de facto, — not only in prospect but in 
fact. So that for Jesus, regarding himself as the 
Messiah, to keep on insisting, and bidding others 
insist, "The kingdom of heaven is approaching," 
would have been the disavowal of his claim. 



JESUS AS PROPHET. 121 

" The kingdom of heaven is at hand ! " This 
term, " the kingdom of heaven/' was identical 
with "the kingdom of God," — the word " heaven" 
being often used, instead of " God," as a synonym 
for " the ineffable name." The word " heaven " here 
had nothing to do with any place or state of exist- 
ence after death. The kingdom of heaven was sim- 
ply and purely the " good time coming," of which 
prophets long ago had prophesied, but which, in the 
time of Jesus, was the one great, persistent, omni- 
present, all-engrossing object of thought throughout 
the length and breadth of Palestine. - This is no 
exaggeration, for Samaria, no less than Galilee and 
Judea, was agitated by this thought. But this 
thought, it must never be forgotten, was never 
fixed and definite. It varied with every variation 
of the national life and with the character of every 
individual prophet. The more spiritual the prophet, 
the more spiritual his conception of the kingdom, 
and vice versa. In general, peace, prosperity, and 
righteousness were regarded as the component 
parts of the "good time coming." The grosser 
minds insisted most upon the prosperity, the ab- 
sence of foreign oppression, the heel of Israel upon 
the necks of the oppressors. The more spiritual 
insisted most upon the righteousness. But even 
where righteousness was uppermost it was gener- 
ally associated with the idea of prosperity. It was 
so in the thought of John. It was so in the thought 



122 THE MAN JESUS. 

of Jesus. Their idea was precisely that of the an- 
cient prophets, that national righteousness would 
be the signal for the heavenly kingdom to appear ; 
but when it did appear, they did not doubt that it 
would usher in an era of unexampled peace and 
prosperity. " Seek first the kingdom of God and 
his righteousness/ ' said Jesus, " and all these things 
shall be added unto you." In the minds of many 
in the time of Jesus, the Messianic time meant 
little more than the deliverance of Palestine from 
the hated power of Eome. The Maccabean dy- 
nasty furnished the elements of their ideal. Some 
even stooped so low as to see the Messiah in Herod 
the Great. John and Jesus were as far as possi- 
ble from these materialistic fancies. With them 
the outward deliverance and prosperity were inci- 
dents of the reign of righteousness. If this was a 
means to an end, the means was greater than the 
end it had in view. 

" The kingdom of heaven is at hand ! " The 
watchword of Jesus was the same as that of John. 
His object was the same : to, as it were, force the 
hand of fate by turning everywhere the hearts of 
men to righteousness ; but with this fundamental 
likeness between John and Jesus, there was an im- 
portant difference, a difference necessitated by the 
difference in their characters. With John the 
Baptist, conscience, with Jesus of Nazareth, affec- 
tion, was supreme. In John we see only the hatred 



JESUS AS PROPHET. 123 

of iniquity; in Jesus we see, I will not say only 
the love of men, but this preeminently and always. 
Hence a different method, especially in the earlier 
part of Jesus' ministry. His tone is not so fierce 
as John's, not so denunciatory. He seeks to draw 
men into the kingdom, where John would drive 
them with the lash of his intolerable invective. 
You will, at once, recall sentences ascribed to Jesus 
that are as drastic as any ascribed to John. And 
they are undoubtedly authentic. But they belong 
to a later stage of his ministry. They were wrung 
from him by the opposition of his enemies. His 
boundless faith in human nature had suffered from 
his practical experience. The initiative of Jesus 
was full of hope and cheer. So enamored was he 
of his own idea, that he imagined it would have 
a universal fascination. 

But the difference between John and Jesus has 
not half been told. You have heard the saying, 
"If God made man in his own image, man has 
well paid him back." Here was a case in point. 
John was a man of almost savage sternness. The 
God of his imagination was a reflection of himself, 
as harsh and stern as the god of any ancient 
prophet, Amos or Hosea. Upon the other hand, 
the boundless love of Jesus was reproduced in his 
idea of God as the universal Father of mankind. 
His God-idea was almost as different as possible 
from that of John ; and I do not think we shall 



124 THE MAN JESUS. 

account for it by seeking here and there in Hebrew 
or in Greek and Eoman writers for a similar idea. 
It will certainly be found there; but of Greek 
and Eoman writers Jesus knew absolutely nothing, 
and the idea of God as a Father was too little em- 
phasized in the Hebrew Scriptures to make much 
impression on his mind. I am obliged to think 
that in the fatherly tenderness of the God of Jesus 
we have simply a reflection of the tenderness of his 
own heart. He was not a student. He was not 
a reasoner. With him, feeling was all in all. He 
was no such egotist as to suppose that his own love 
could outstrip the love of Heaven. Less from ob- 
servation of the fact than because the sunshine of 
his own affection fell equally upon the evil and the 
good, the rain of his own pitying tears equally upon 
the just and unjust, he made bold to predicate 
these attributes of the Eternal. Because the pub- 
licans and harlots were dearer in his eyes than the 
most righteous in the community, he ascribed this 
preference to God. To the woman taken in adul- 
tery he could say, " Thy sins are forgiven thee," 
because of his swift inference, an inference the 
validity of which he never doubted, that God could 
not be less forgiving than himself. So everywhere 
the God of Jesus reflects his own immeasurable 
tenderness. In this sense, indeed, he might have 
said in the phrase of the Fourth Gospel, "He that 
hath seen me hath seen the Father." But he never 



JESUS AS PROPHET. 125 

could or would have said this, for he was not him- 
self aware that his idea of the Father was the reflex 
image of his own " enthusiasm for humanity." 

This enthusiasm manifested itself in the desig- 
nation of himself, which was apparently anterior to 
his assumption of Messiahship, — "the Son of Man." 
Never once in the Synoptic Gospels does he call 
himself "the Son of God;" but the expression 
" Son of Man " is ever on his lips, as one that sums 
up, in a perfect manner, the elements of his self- 
consciousness. "Why was this so ? The answer 
generally is, Because in Daniel the Messiah is 
spoken of as one " whose form is as the Son of 
Man," so that when Jesus called himself the Son 
of Man he simply meant to call himself the Mes- 
siah. The criticism of Kuenen is convincing to 
my mind that there is no personal Messiah in 
Daniel, that the " one whose form is as the Son of 
Man " is the Jewish nation. But it may be granted 
that the expression was applied to the Messiah in 
the time of Jesus. Did Jesus use it in this way ? 
Not originally, if he asked the question, " Whom 
do men say that I, the Son of Man, am ? " for 
then it could only mean, "Do men say that I, the 
Messiah, am the Messiah ? " Later it may be that 
Jesus accepted the Messianic force of these words 
and applied them to his second coming " in the 
clouds of heaven;" but the expression "Son of 
Man " is used in the Old Testament, outside of Dan- 



126 THE MAN JESUS. 

iel, without any Messianic meaning, and oftenest to 
'express the idea of man, limited and imperfect, 
bearing the burdens that are incidental to his 
mortal lot. On this account, I doubt not, Jesus 
made it synonymous with his own name. It iden- 
tified him with humanity; it expressed the desire of 
his heart to be thoroughly human. Christendom 
has wasted an incalculable amount of energy in the 
endeavor to exhibit Jesus as " the Son of God/' and 
even as God himself. For commentary on this we 
have the record that the only anxiety of Jesus was 
to be, and to be considered, absolutely human; 
and to this end he called himself "the Son of 
Man." 

His love of man spoke in this phrase, as in his 
designation of God as Abba, Father ; and his 
love of man is the one sentiment which breathes 
from every page of the New Testament tradition ; 
nor this in any vague, far-off, and abstract way, 
but in the most concrete way imaginable. It was 
not the ideal man, — the possible man, — that he 
loved, but the men and women of Palestine, the 
most abased of them as much — more than the 
most respectable. The oratorio of "The Messiah" 
has long been written ; its music glorious ; its text 
an irrational conglomeration of all the absurdities 
of Biblical interpretation that have attached them- 
selves to the theological Christ. The symphony 
of the Messiah has yet to be written. It awaits 



JESUS AS PROPHET. 127 

the master-hand which shall combine the tender- 
ness of Beethoven, at his tenderest, with the tu- 
multuous energy of Wagner in his stormiest mood. 
And when it is written, the unifying theme which 
will underlie every movement, from the joyous 
opening to the dark and stormy close, will be a 
theme which will express, as well as music can, a 
love of man, whose tenderness and passion were 
incalculably pure and high. For such a love it was 
that underlay the life of Jesus from its beginning 
to its end, and gathered up into itself all of its joy 
and sorrow, all of its seeming discords, fusing them 
into harmonious unity. 

The localities of Jesus' teaching are but vaguely 
hinted at in the New Testament tradition. He 
began his work, it would appear, in Capernaum, a 
thriving town upon the Sea of Galilee, well to the 
north. Luke's representation that he began at 
Nazareth is without any internal or general con- 
sistency. From Capernaum he sallied out into the 
various towns and villages which in his day dotted 
the smiling, verdurous, and fruitful plain of Gen- 
nesareth. Dreams of the kingdom of God came 
naturally in such a place as that, a marvel in its 
loveliness. The ministry of Jesus was never so 
widely extended as we should gather from the 
general expressions that follow up the various par- 
ticular accounts of his preaching. These are the 
school-boy's " and so forth " with which he seeks 



128 THE MAN JESUS. 

to round out his imperfect lesson. The immediate 
vicinity of Lake Gennesareth would seem to have 
engrossed the bulk of his activity, and Capernaum 
to have been his favorite sallying point and resting 
place. That occasionally his journeys were ex- 
tended beyond the fishing villages of Gennesareth 
and the towns of the adjacent plain, to Nazareth and 
its vicinity, across the lake, and northward to the 
extreme boundary of Galilee, even, perhaps, across 
it into heathen Thenicia, there can be no serious 
doubt ; nor can there be any that the synagogues 
were his favorite places of public utterance, nor that 
in them, at first, his word was frequently welcomed 
and approved. Further on, as his opposition to 
the ecclesiastical powers became more pronounced, 
the synagogues were superseded by other places, 
such as convenience might offer. And quite from 
the beginning the synagogue was not his only place 
of teaching. Hillside and plain he made his van- 
tage-grounds ; they lent him birds and flowers to 
illustrate his words ; the fisherman's boat became 
his pulpit ; and as he walked from one village to 
another he talked with his disciples, or as he re- 
clined with them at table after the fatigues of the 
day. Then the stream of his discourse was never 
dry. It was an easy, careless, joyous life he led, 
— that of the initial weeks and months of his min- 
istry. His heart was overflowing with the sense of 
the eternal goodness and the nearness of the Day 



JESUS AS PROPHET. 129 

of the Lord. Men and women gave him freely 
of their hearts' best love, and his little world of 
pure affection and of kindly service seemed to him 
a pledge and illustration of the universal rejuve- 
nation, whose prophecy was in his heart. If we 
can trust the record at this point, — and it is as 
trustworthy here as anywhere, — the faith of Jesus 
in the Fatherly Providence was so complete that 
he dissuaded men from all anxiety in regard to what 
they should eat or drink or wear. The nature of 
his perspective, however, must be taken into . the 
account. The kingdom of heaven was at hand, 
and a prominent feature of this kingdom was the 
uncoaxed abundance of the earth. Jesus was not a 
political economist. He was not a captain of labor. 
The dignity of labor, the morality of industrial 
enterprise, — these things had no place in his con- 
ception of the world. The poor attracted him much 
more than the rich ; their vices seemed to him less 
dangerous. Injustice, cruelty, and oppression were 
more hateful to him than vices of passion and im- 
providence. A lover of little children and the 
home, with an immense capacity for loving and for 
being loved, he nevertheless advised a celibate life 
for those whose passions could endure so much re- 
straint, — this, too, I am obliged to think, in view 
of the impending catastrophe which tvas to entirely 
revolutionize the existing order of society. 

The fallacy of his industrial ideas was obscured 
9 



130 THE MAN JESUS. 

for Jesus, it would seem, by the ability and gener- 
osity of his earliest disciples. Two pairs of fish- 
ermen-brothers, Peter and Andrew, James and 
John, appear to have been well-to-do persons, and 
to have devoted themselves entirely to him. Of 
these four disciples, Peter and James and John 
seem to have been the most confidential friends of 
Jesus, and in this order, the representation of 
John as " the beloved disciple " being entirely 
absent from the Synoptics. Of "The Twelve" 
whom he selected as his habitual companions, these 
are in the foreground always. Of the others, except 
Judas of Kerioth, little is said or known. The 
apostle Matthew is identified with Matthew, the 
publican-disciple in the First Gospel, who is called 
Levi in Mark and Luke, where there is not a hint 
that he was the same as Matthew. If he was not, 
then many a shrewd discovery of the publican 
character in the First Gospel must go the way of 
others of its kind, equally shrewd and wholly 
fanciful. 

Criticism has sometimes gone so far as to deny 
that the twelve were ever called apostles in the 
lifetime of Jesus, or that he ever sent them forth ; 
but for the second of these statements there is suffi- 
cient proof. Luke represents him as sending out 
seventy after the twelve. The dogmatic animus 
is here apparent. As the twelve stand for the 
twelve tribes of Israel, so the seventy stand for the 



JESUS AS PROPHET. 131 

seventy nations of the world, as counted or imag- 
ined at that time. Luke, as the less Jewish Gos- 
pel, is not satisfied with a Jewish apostolate. The 
seventy are a dogmatic invention. Even the send- 
ing out of the twelve would seem to have been an 
experiment which a few weeks', or even a few 
days' trial proved to be hopeless. With the excep- 
tion of this brief period of absence, the twelve 
were the companions of Jesus upon his journeys. 
There is abundant evidence that they entered very 
imperfectly into his thought. Their conception of 
the kingdom of heaven was material and gross. 
They disputed among themselves who should have 
precedence in its princely arrangements. Nothing 
would satisfy the mother of James and John but 
that her sons should sit one on the right hand and 
the other on the left of the Messiah in his king- 
dom. This mention of Salome reminds us that 
several women, of whom she was one, accompanied 
Jesus and the twelve wherever they went. Mary of 
Magdala, and another Mary, occupied the foremost 
place in his regard. The devotion of these women 
to the fortunes of Jesus was without any senti- 
mental implication. Eenan has broached a different 
opinion ; but always in Judea the religious teacher 
that demanded the most renunciation attracted 
women to his side. So the Pharisees had many 
devotees among the women. It was natural that 
Jesus should enjoy the same distinction. 



132 THE MAN JESUS. 

The insatiable curiosity of the Galileans, and 
their easy hospitality, came to the aid of Jesus and 
his little company of travelling companions. Lodg- 
ing and sustenance were gladly furnished them in 
almost every town and village of their missionary 
field. In course of time this included Nazareth, 
the birthplace of Jesus, where he had lived for 
many years ; but men and women who had known 
him, from his childhood up, were slow to recognize 
the prophet of the kingdom, much less the Mes- 
siah, in one who had mended their cradles for them, 
and built their cribs and stalls. His mother and 
his brothers were as slow as any of the rest to take 
him at his own valuation, if indeed they did not 
lead the opposition to his claims. They even fol- 
lowed him to Capernaum, and endeavored to dis- 
suade him from the task he had assumed. I need 
not say how ill these facts accord with any fancy 
of his miraculous birth. We do not entertain the 
possibility of any such occurrence. 

The sum of Jesus' teaching during the Galilean 
period was exhausted by his endeavors to set forth 
the manner of life which men should lead who 
expected to be citizens of the kingdom of heaven. 
In form, his teaching was not strikingly original. 
Aphorism and paradox were favorite methods with 
the rabbinism of the time, and the parable was not 
so entirely strange to it as Eenan has affirmed. To 
the paradox, Jesus was extremely partial. Some of 



JESUS AS PROPHET. 133 

his weightiest utterances are cast in this mould, — 
the assertion as a fact, of that which seems a con- 
tradiction, as : " To him that hath shall be given, 
and from him that hath not shall be taken away 
even that which he hath ; " " B[e that saveth his 
life shall lose it, and he that loseth his life shall 
save it." He was fond, too, of convicting men out 
of their own mouths ; of asking them questions of 
which the inevitable answer was the confirmation 
of his principles. Thomas Fuller says of the good 
woman, "She makes plain cloth to be velvet by 
her handsome wearing of it ; " so Jesus made the 
parable, which up to his time had been only mod- 
erately efficient, an instrument, a weapon with 
which he accomplished wonders. His parables 
must ever seem to us the most characteristic part 
of his teaching. Their charm is largely in their 
homeliness. They are the utterances of a man who 
could not be indifferent to any aspect of the busy 
life that was going on about him, even though he 
believed that a new order was impending. We 
must be on our guard against the illusive notion 
that the aphorisms and parables of Jesus were 
poured forth in any such numbers at a time as the 
Gospels, especially the first, would indicate. The 
method of the First Gospel, as I have said, is to 
mass things of like character, — parables, sentences, 
miracles, and so on. What is most likely is that 
the parables were delivered one at a time, and the 



134 THE MAN JESUS. 

sentences in no such torrent as the " Sermon on the 
Mount," which is evidently made up of all the 
richest sentences of Jesus during the Galilean pe- 
riod. As. to the substance of these teachings, as 
well as to their ^>rm, we must take warning. The 
Gospels assumed their present form throughout a 
period when various controversies were agitating 
the bosom of the infant church. These controver- 
sies have left their mark upon the Gospels. Es- 
pecially the Judaizing tendency of the infant 
church has done so. To take a single example: 
the man thrust out because he had not worn a 
wedding garment. The wedding garment here is 
evidently the ceremonial righteousness without 
which, in opposition to Paul, the Jewish Chris- 
tians insisted that no heathen could come in. This 
is but one instance, out of a score that might be 
easily named, where certainly the words attributed 
to Jesus never came from him. 

Seeking to penetrate to what was most essential 
in the teachings of Jesus and in his general atti- 
tude, we shall do best to consider separately his 
relations to the different parties and divisions that 
made up his political and social and religious 
world. Beginning at the periphery, the heathen 
world first offers itself for our consideration. It is 
not to be doubted that Jesus felt the sense of out- 
rage common to all his people, in view of the op- 
pressive tyranny of Borne; but he was with the 



JESUS AS PROPHET. 135 

Pharisees against the Zealots in his conviction that 
this tyranny must wait for God to give the sign of 
its abolishment. The Zealots, the patriots of the 
patriots, wished to hasten somewhat the steps of 
the Almighty by an energetic resistance of their 
own. The Pharisees urged that with the advent 
of the Messiah, or the Messianic kingdom, the 
Eoman power would shrivel into naught. This 
was the idea of Jesus. The insurrection of Judas 
the Gaulonite was fresh in his memory. He had 
no inclination to follow in his steps. Between him 
and the Zealots, then, there could have been little 
sympathy. Simon the Zealot was one of the 
twelve, but his conquests in this direction must 
have been few. 

But while in this particular Jesus was in agree- 
ment with the Pharisees, his general attitude to 
the heathen world was entirely foreign to their 
principles. The structure of the Galilean world 
assisted him to wider sympathies than were cur- 
rent in Jerusalem. Galilee, or the northern part 
of it, was called contemptuously by the Judeans 
" Galilee of the Gentiles." In Capernaum and 
elsewhere Jesus must frequently have come in 
contact with a heathen population, and, as a man 
looking through his own eyes, he must have found 
the heathen frequently in more perfect accord with 
his moral ideal than the self-righteous Pharisees. 
Nevertheless, the attitude of Jesus, with reference 



136 THE MAN JESUS. 

to both heathens and Samaritans, is one of the 
most perplexing problems of New Testament crit- 
icism. The sayings, on this head, attributed to him 
abound in contradictions. The net result, when 
we have made allowance for the distortion of the 
Petro-Pauline controversy, and for a natural de- 
velopment of thought, is that, as time went on, 
Jesus grew more and more sympathetic towards 
the heathen and Samaritans, and finally imagined 
that the former would enjoy the benefits of the 
approaching kingdom to a fuller extent than his 
own countrymen. 

The relation of Jesus to "the unchurched," as 
we might call them, of his day, the common peo- 
ple, the outcasts of the temple and the synagogue, 
is central to his character and his career. It is the 
key of his position. These were " the lost sheep of 
the house of Israel." The Pharisees did not con- 
sider them worth seeking or saving. They dreaded 
contact with them as a stain upon their ceremonial 
cleanness. Now it was to this class that Jesus ad- 
dressed himself with special earnestness ; and his 
opposition to the Pharisees culminated in the most 
damaging assertion that his lips could frame or his 
imagination could conceive, when he hurled this 
saying in their teeth : " The publicans and harlots 
shall go into the kingdom of heaven before you." 
This joining together of the terms " publicans" and 
" harlots " indicates that the two classes were gen- 



JESUS AS PROPHET. 137 

erally regarded as the lowest in the community, 
and, by consequence, that they had an attraction 
for each other. The relations of Jesus with these 
classes indicate the extent of his rebellion against 
the orthodoxy of his time. The publicans were 
equally despised and hated by both Zealots and 
Pharisees. Even their money was not good for 
charity, — a point to which our modern orthodoxy 
has not yet attained. But Jesus mingled freely 
with this class, found disciples if not an apostle 
among them, and upbraided the Pharisees for not 
following their example in seeking the baptism of 
John. 

The relation of Jesus to the Pharisaic party has 
been incidentally set forth already in declaring his 
relation to the Zealots, to the heathen, and Sama- 
ritans, and finally to the pariahs of the community; 
but this relation must be more carefully developed. 
There can be no doubt that an idea of the Phari- 
sees derived from the New Testament alone would 
be exceedingly unjust. There were Pharisees and 
Pharisees. The self-righteousness of some was re- 
buked by others of their class. The maxims of 
Jesus, which score their faults most deeply, can be 
paralleled by maxims of their own. So, too, can 
many of his higher maxims of sincerity and the 
religion of the heart. And Jesus was not unaware 
of this. The end of his work has obscured for us 
the beginning, but, taking the record as it stands, 



138 THE MAN JESUS. 

it is evident that his distrust of the Pharisees was 
a thing of gradual development. At first he min- 
gled with them freely, and expected them to give 
him sympathy and aid. His disciples must have 
been recruited to a considerable extent from their 
ranks. He distinguished them as " the righteous " 
from " the sinners " for whom he had compassion. 
Even his words, " Unless your righteousness exceed 
that of the scribes and Pharisees ye shall in no 
wise enter the kingdom," imply that their right- 
eousness was indisputable and the best then current. 
In what respect did he regard their righteousness 
as defective ? In this : that it was too exclusively 
a matter of outward forms and ceremonies, too little 
a matter of the heart. This was what Matthew 
Arnold calls " the secret of Jesus," — his perception 
that it is character which gives to conduct its abid- 
ing grace and glory. Individual Pharisees had 
seen so much. Their maxims, those of Hillel and 
others, had perhaps reached the ear of Jesus ; but his 
concern was with the average Pharisaism of his time, 
and this was wholly engrossed with ceremonial 
considerations ; not only with conduct rather than 
with character, but with ceremonial rather than 
with social conduct. Men excused themselves 
from supporting their aged parents on the plea 
that their money was pledged to the treasury of 
the temple. The central idea of Jesus was that, 
while social was more important than ceremonial 



JESUS AS PROPHET. 139 

conduct, the most important thing of all was the 
inward disposition. To be free of murderous and 
licentious acts was not enough. One must be free 
from cruel thoughts and from impure desires. 
Here bursts the thought of Jesus into its perfect 
flower. 

With such an estimate of the relative values of 
ceremonial and inward purity, it was inevitable 
that Jesus should grow more and more indifferent 
to those things which in the view of the Pharisees 
were of the first importance. At first, we may con- 
ceive, he was disposed to let the ceremonial right- 
eousness remain intact, and try to infuse into it a 
principle of inward life. His sayings, on this head, 
have certainly been garbled by the Judaizing Chris- 
tians of a later time, but so much is still apparent. 
It was, however, impossible for him to maintain 
this attitude for any length of time. Ceremonial 
piety endures "no brother near the throne," and 
much less a subordinate position ; but, with Phari- 
saic insistence on the importance of Levitical purity 
and Sabbatical observance, Jesus grew more con- 
temptuous of these things, and more antagonistic 
in his sentiments. If he did not make occasions 
for offence, he neglected none that offered. He 
neglected the Levitical washings, and did not exact 
them of his disciples. He caressed with loving 
hands the outcasts of the temple and the synagogue. 
He sat at meat with publicans. He allowed " a 



140 THE MAN JESUS. 

woman that was a sinner" to bathe his feet and 
wipe them with her hair. He went through the 
cornfields on the Sabbath with his disciples, and 
bade them pluck the corn and eat it. " Eat that 
which is set before you," he said to his disciples, 
with shocking disregard of any consideration of 
Levitical cleanness ; and again he said, in funda- 
mental hostility to the Pharisaic casuistry, "Not 
that which goeth into a man defileth him ; " a 
splendidly audacious saying in its day, which was 
not literally true, and is not so in ours. 

The genius of Jesus was not intellectual but 
moral. He did not speculate. He was no theolo- 
gian. The Church has its " Apostles' Creed." It 
has never pretended to have a creed of Jesus. Not 
one of the arid propositions of its various creeds 
can claim his sanction. He never uttered anything 
that can be called a theological proposition. Never- 
theless, a certain theology is implied in his teach- 
ings ; and this was the theology of his time, above 
the limitations of which his intellectual concep- 
tions never rose. Indeed, upon the side of science 
there was something possible, even at that time in 
the world, to which he did not attain. He made 
the superstitions of his time the vehicles of his 
moral earnestness. He believed in angels and dev- 
ils, in a prince of devils, in demoniacal possession, 
in the resurrection of the body, in a material Ge- 
henna, in special providence, and so on. Some of 



JESUS AS PROPHET. 141 

these beliefs were sources of strength to him, while 
others were sources of weakness. Especially was 
his belief in a hierarchy of devils greatly to his 
advantage. It enabled him to cope with the phe- 
nomena of nervous disease, called demoniacal pos- 
session, as he could not otherwise have done. For 
the success of his exorcism, it was necessary for 
him to believe in the reality of the possession, and 
in himself as the herald or Messiah of a kingdom 
diametrically opposed to that of Satan. In all his 
dealings with the so-called demoniacs we see him 
consciously measuring his power with Satan, as 
Ormuzd against Ahriman in the Persian theology. 
Such dealings, therefore, had for him a religious 
significance; but he did well to recognize that 
the faith of the sufferer was the efficient cause of 
his recovery, — faith in his power over the world 
of devils ; for " it was the superstition itself which 
formed the generative cause of the disease," so that 
with the conviction that the power of Jesus was 
superior to that of Satan, the disease was immedi- 
ately abated, if not cured. But what convinced 
the demoniacs of the superiority of Jesus was the 
strength of his own personal conviction. His voice 
and manner were their surety for this. 

The instances of successful dealing with the de- 
moniacs were certainly not numerous, but they 
were multiplied and magnified by the popular 
imagination and report ; they changed, upon their 



142 THE MAN JESUS. 

travels, into cures of lepers and the dumb and 
blind, and, thus exaggerated, served, in no small 
degree, to increase the popular interest in Jesus, 
and to swell the crowd of his disciples. In the 
autumn months of A. D. 34, we may conceive of 
Jesus as being widely famed, though not so widely 
known, in Galilee ; as attracting wherever he went 
an eager concourse of people; as being almost 
worshipped by an inner circle of believers ; as at- 
tracting to himself many of the more spiritual 
scribes and Pharisees, and especially as endearing 
himself, in an unprecedented manner, to the most 
despised and miserable in the community. Never 
had the kingdom of heaven seemed so near to any 
of its prophets as then it seemed to him. His 
spiritual eye " saw Satan, like lightning, fall from 
heaven," — the power of evil suddenly and irrecov- 
erably beaten down and utterly destroyed. The 
idyl of Galilee culminated in this ecstasy of eager 
hope and joyful expectation. Of course he was 
mistaken in his calculations, and was doomed to 
disappointment ; but the mistake of believing too 
much in man, and too much in the power of one's 
own consecration, is a sublime mistake. If only 
enough could be induced to make it (to be as para- 
doxical as Jesus), it would be a mistake no longer, 
but God's kingdom would come and his will would 
be done upon the earth as in the heaven of the 
ideal. 



JESUS AS PROPHET. 143 

It was not long before the necessities of Jesus' sit- 
uation brought him to the beginning of the end. His 
heedlessness of ceremonial purity, his subordina- 
tion of Sabbatical observance to the claims of com- 
mon-sense morality and kindliness, his association 
with the outcasts of the synagogue and temple, — 
these things, and such as these, brought him into 
ever sharper contrast with the Pharisaic party, 
whose hot protagonists began to dog his steps and 
seek to involve him in controversies which they 
knew would damage him with the ecclesiastical 
authorities. Their pertinacity sharpened the edge 
of his invective. The more they menaced him, the 
more defiantly he answered them. But there were 
times when he was weary of the controversy, now 
each day renewed, and again and again he took 
himself off into some quiet place, where he could 
be alone with his disciples, and meditate upon his 
future course. News came to him that John the 
Baptist had been put to death in prison, and the 
fate of his great teacher seemed almost a premoni- 
tion of his own. Was ever such an azure heaven 
overspread so soon with dark and threatening 
-clouds ? News came to him that Herod Antipas 
was intending to follow up the destruction of John 
the Baptist with his own. The lips that uttered the 
beatitudes had learned to enunciate a different lan- 
guage. "Go tell that fox," he said, "that I have 
yet some time to stay in Galilee before I go up to 



144 THE MAN JESUS. 

Jerusalem." Already, then, the consciousness that 
he must go up there and face the hierarchy in the 
stronghold of its bigotry and zeal had dawned upon 
his mind. His fame had already gone so far. The 
more the pity ! For back over the course which it 
had travelled came certain Pharisees from Jerusa- 
lem, apparently sent out to spy into his teachings 
and entrap him into dangerous admissions. They 
succeeded perfectly. From henceforth it was war 
to the knife. As if to gather up his energies for 
the encounter, Jesus betook himself beyond the 
borders of Galilee, into the vicinity of Tyre and 
Sidon. Eeturning to the lake-shore, he found his 
enemies awaiting him with a new stratagem. They 
wanted a sign from heaven. Was not their want- 
ing it itself a sign that his cures of the possessed 
were too near akin to the cures of their own exor- 
cists to pass with them for genuine miracles ? But 
these were all he had to offer; and he did not 
offer these. If miracle had played the part in the 
economy of Jesus which modern orthodoxy claims, 
there would have been no excuse for his not per- 
forming such a miracle as would have silenced 
every demur at his prophetic office. What he did 
was to blast the Pharisees, and, with them, the ped- 
lers in Christian evidences from that day to this, 
with the assertion, " A wicked and adulterous gen- 
eration seeketh after a sign, but there shall no sign 
be mven them." 



JESUS AS PROPHET. 145 

Once more he drew apart into a region remote 
from the scenes of his ordinary activity. His jour- 
ney brought him into the neighborhood of Caesarea- 
Philippi, the handsome city which Philip Antipas 
had built as a compliment to the Eoman emperor. 
It was a purely pagan city in its architecture and 
the manner of its life; but though Jesus had 
wandered among its theatres and palaces he would 
have had no eyes to see the glittering spectacle. 
His eyes were turned inward upon his heart ; and 
what he read there was that he was the Messiah, and 
that as the Messiah he must go up to Jerusalem. 

The struggle and the disappointment had not 
had the effect which would have followed on them 
in a less exalted mind. Instead of convincing Je- 
sus that he was something less than the herald of 
the kingdom, they had convinced him that he was 
something more, and that he must assume the role 
which had been assigned to him by his self-con- 
sciousness. He could not help admitting that his 
Galilean ministry had ended in something which 
was more like failure than success. Its joyous in- 
itiative had not been followed up by a succession of 
victories. Had he then dared too much ? Nay, 
not enough. Now he would dare all. He had too 
long denied the pleading of his heart. Why had 
he not believed that still small voice which had so 
often told him that he was the Christ ? For it is 
not conceivable that his Messianic seif-conscious- 

10 



146 THE MAN JESUS. 

ness was any sudden apparition. Very gradually 
it must have dawned upon his mind. He called 
his disciples about him and asked them, " Whom 
do men say that I am ? " They told him, Some said 
this, and some said that. " But whom do you say 
that I am?" he questioned eagerly. " Thou art 
the Messiah," said Peter. " Blessed art thou, Si- 
mon," he exclaimed, " for flesh and blood have not 
revealed it unto thee, but my Father who is in 
heaven;" but even then he charged his disciples 
that for the present they should tell no man that 
he was the Messiah. 

It was inevitable that Jesus should soon or late 
arrive at this conviction. Accepting the idea of 
a personal Messiah as the inaugurator of the king- 
dom of heaven, his sense of the nearness of that 
kingdom, and the complete coincidence of his own 
spiritual ideal with his ideal conception of the 
Messiah, compelled him to identify himself with 
him. A book has recently been written on the 
Manliness of Jesus. This was its supreme ex- 
ample : to measure his qualification for the Mes- 
sianic office not by the standards of Zealots or 
Herodians, Pharisees or Sadducees, but by his own 
personal ideal. 

For it was not as if the assumption of the Mes- 
sianic office portended to his fancy any pleasurable 
experience, any victorious career, any magnificent 
sway. It was a Messiah who should " suffer many 



JESUS AS PROPHET. 147 

things " that he conceived himself to be. Simul- 
taneously with the conviction that he was the 
Messiah, was borne in upon him the conviction 
that he must go up to Jerusalem, not to triumph, 
but — to die. It was with this understanding that 
he accepted at once his office and his doom ; but 
to measure the heroism implied in such an act, we 
must clear our minds of every least survival of the 
superstition that Jesus was anything more or less 
than a purely human person. We have recently 
been told that to appreciate the sufferings of Jesus 
we must apprehend him as a suffering God, What 
an absurdity is this ! Who could not suffer any- 
thing with the resources of an infinite nature to 
fall back upon ? The glory of Jesus is that as a 
man, and so considering himself — for being the 
Messiah did not unman him — he went to meet 
a miserable doom with an unquestioning submis- 
sion to the logic of events. 

When a gulf opened in the heart of Eome, so 
runs the tale, the oracle declared that the most 
precious thing in Eome must be thrown into it ere 
it would close ; and men brought their gold, and 
women their jewels, and threw them into the gulf, 
and still it did not close. Then came a young man 
and leaped into the chasm, and it closed and opened 
not again. His perfect manhood was the most 
precious thing in Eome. 

Into the gulf which yawned in the heart of his 



148 THE MAN JESUS. 

nation, between the actual and the ideal, Jesus of 
Nazareth threw himself with noble scorn of death. 
His manhood was the most precious thing in Pal- 
estine. And if the chasm did not close above him, 
if the ideal still shamed the actual, and does unto 
this day, his courage was not less than if the edges 
of the gulf had kissed above his grave, nor any less 
should be our gratefulness. 






V. 

JESUS AS MESSIAH. 



" The first tiling we have to do, then, is to take the record 
of the facts, if we can, absolutely without the warp of any 
preconceived opinion, or any theological dogmatism. Look- 
ing at them so, it appears plain that what we call the Mes- 
sianic consciousness of Jesus, which is so intense and even 
predominant towards the close of his ministry, was a com- 
paratively late development in him. To put it in theologi- 
cal phrase, his generation as son of God was anterior to 
his appointment as Messiah of the Jews. In the language 
we usually apply to human experience, his vocation as a 
moral and spiritual teacher was recognized first ; and only 
as an after-result came his strong conviction that he was the 
chosen deliverer of his people, though by a way they could 
not understand or follow." 

Joseph Henry Allen. 



JESUS AS MESSIAH. 

I HAVE said that simultaneously with his ar- 
rival at the conviction that he was himself the 
Messiah, Jesus arrived at the conviction that he 
must " suffer many things," and die a miserable 
death in furtherance of his Messianic mission. 
We may be very sure, however, that as his antici- 
pations and predictions of his impending fate 
stand written in the New Testament, they enter 
into particulars much more than he did ; they 
foreshadow the actual course of events to an ex- 
tent which must have been for him impossible. 
It was inevitable that the events and the ideas of 
a period subsequent to the life of Jesu's, during 
which the New Testament writings were gradually 
assuming their present form, should leave their 
impress upon the traditions of his speech and ac- 
tion. One result of this reflex influence is that 
even in the Synoptic Gospels, as they stand, the 
anticipations of a tragical conclusion of his min- 
istry are put into the mouth of Jesus much too 



152 THE MAN JESUS. 

soon. In John we meet them on the very thresh- 
old of the narration. Another result of this reflex 
influence is that the resurrection of Jesus is made 
a part of his anticipation of coming events. Those 
who accept his resurrection as a fact will find no 
difficulty in believing that he frequently spoke of 
it as a coming event. A coming event of such 
stupendous magnitude might well have cast its 
shadow before ; but, for those of us who do not 
accept the resurrection of Jesus as a fact, the nu- 
merous allusions to it attributed to him by the 
Synoptists are still easily explicable on the ground 
that the belief in Jesus' resurrection was an un- 
doubted fact during the tradition-forming and gos- 
pel-making period, and that this belief must have 
been ascribed to Jesus ; his knowledge of it must 
have been assumed, and the most innocent sayings 
on his part must have been unwittingly distorted 
into the service of his assumed prevision. Thus, 
for example, "the sign of the prophet Jonah," 
which Jesus insists is the only sign that he will 
give, is made by the Synoptist to mean that Jo- 
nah's concealment for three days in the whale's 
belly was a sign of Jesus' three days' concealment 
in the grave. In fact, as the connection plainly 
shows, " the sign of the prophet Jonah," as Jesus 
understood it, was merely his preaching to the Gen- 
tiles, which Jesus regarded as a sign or omen of 
his own resort to such a line of action. As here, 



JESUS AS MESSIAH. 153 

so elsewhere, and in many instances, the belief of 
after-times distorted the meaning of Jesus, and 
even made him the mouth-piece of words which 
he could not have uttered. It is still possible, 
however, that Jesus anticipated some of the par : 
ticulars of his death, such as his condemnation by 
the Sanhedrin, and his crucifixion by the Soman 
government, seeing that this was the natural order 
of events. Tailing foul of the ecclesiastical pow 7 ers 
of Jerusalem, he knew the doctors of the Sanhe- 
drin would be his judges. He knew they would 
condemn him, and that if they could carry out 
their own sentence he would be stoned to death ; 
but the Sanhedrin could not execute its own sen- 
tence under the Eoman rule. This had its own 
favorite form of punishment. It was crucifixion. 
That Jesus should have known so much is not im- 
possible, scarcely improbable, and so he may have 
spoken of his condemnation by the Sanhedrin, and 
of his death upon the cross. 

That Jesus should come at length, to think of 
himself as the Messiah was not so strange as the 
simultaneous conclusion that he must be a suf- 
fering Messiah, for the Messianic idea was so 
omnipresent to the Jewish mind that for a man 
conscious of a great mission not to connect his 
mission in some way with that idea, was quite im- 
possible. It was the grandeur of his spiritual ideal 
that compelled Jesus to identify his mission with 



154 THE MAN JESUS. 

the Messianic office. He remained the herald 
of the kingdom so long as he could consistently 
do so. The Messiah must be the incarnation 
of the highest possible ideal. To himself Jesus 
was this. This wonderful self-confidence on the 
part of Jesus did not necessitate self-righteousness, 
only an absolute devotion to the moral welfare of 
mankind, — only an absolute conviction that right- 
eousness and love were fundamental facts in the 
new order. It was as representative of these that 
he demanded personal allegiance ; but the conclu- 
sion that, as the Messiah, he must " suffer many 
things," — this was so foreign to all ordinary con- 
ceptions of the Messiah current in his time, that 
its adoption by the self-consciousness of Jesus is, 
at first glance, a great enigma. The ordinary con- 
ception of the Messiah in the time of Jesus was 
as a powerful and triumphant king, who should 
subdue the oppressors of the Jewish people, and 
conquer for himself a universal dominion. If such 
a vision of his personal future ever beguiled the 
heart of Jesus, we may be sure that it was -not for 
long. But associated with the kingly idea of the 
Messiah was the prophetic. Here was the point 
at which the personal ideal of Jesus married with 
the popular conception, and begot his personal 
consciousness of himself as the Messiah. Now, in 
the second part of Isaiah (chapters xl. to lxvi.), 
which we know to have been written by some 



JESUS AS MESSIAH. 155 

prophet of the captivity, about 536 b. c., but which 
Jesus, like all his contemporaries, ascribed to the 
true Isaiah of the eighth' century, — in this won- 
derful fragment, the cap-sheaf of Old Testament 
prophecy, there figures prominently "the servant 
of God," who is represented as a teacher or prophet ; 
thus : a Behold my servant, whom I uphold ; mine 
elect, in whom my soul delighteth. I have put my 
Spirit upon him : he shall, declare judgment to the 
Gentiles. He shall not strive nor cry. He shall 
declare judgment with truth. He shall not fail 
nor be discouraged till he set judgment in the 
earth : far lands wait for his law." We may be 
sure, I think, that so far as the Messianic self-con- 
sciousness of Jesus nourished itself upon Scriptural 
food, it found it in these and other similar passages 
of the Deutero-Isaiah. Jesus was here less critical 
than the rabbis of his time, for they understood 
the " servant of God " in these passages to mean 
the Jewish people, or the body of faithful Jews, and 
modern criticism has almost unanimously corrobo- 
rated their opinion. Now, in the fifty-third chap- 
ter of this same fragment, the Servant of Jehovah 
i& represented as debased and suffering, while at 
the same time his ultimate triumph is portended. 
" He was despised and rejected of men, a man of 
sorrows, and acquainted with grief." In the ora- 
torio of "The Messiah," the tenderest passage in the 
music is that which corresponds to these words. 



156 THE 'MAN JESUS. 

This is as it should be, for we may well believe 
that no other passage in the Old Testament was so 
central to the thought of Jesus. I do not mean 
that his anticipation of a catastrophic ending to 
his ministry was entirely derived from this text 
and its context. His observation of the spirit of 
the Pharisees, as he saw them in Galilee, led him 
to expect the worst when he should meet them in 
Jerusalem, as he meant to meet them, with a ges- 
ture of defiance ; but what was predicated in the 
fifty-third chapter of Isaiah of the Servant of Je- 
hovah, tallied almost exactly with his natural 
anticipation. " Surely," the prophet says, "he hath 
borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows ; yet we 
did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and af- 
flicted. He was wounded for our transgressions, 
he was bruised for our iniquities. He was taken 
from prison and from judgment: and who of his 
generation regarded it, why he was cut off out of 
the land of the living ? and he made his grave 
with the wicked, and with sinners in his death ; 
although he had done no violence, neither was any 
deceit in his mouth, yet it pleased the Lord to 
bruise him; he hath put him to grief." The con- 
temporaries of Jesus did not apply these words 
to the Messiah, but Jesus did, and therefore to 
himself. Even before the announcement of his 
Messiahship at Csesarea-Philippi, he must often 
have brooded over them. The future which they 



JESUS AS MESSIAH. 157 

pictured for him was very different from that which 
his own hopeful and loving heart had pictured at 
the beginning of his ministry only ten months ago ; 
but there had been no break in the development 
of his ideas. Now the conviction of impending- 
shame and death would haunt him more and more. 
Meantime the idea of a suffering Messiah would 
shock the Zealots and the Pharisees, and excite 
their animosity. Nor was it strange that it should 
do so. For one man to set up his idea of the Mes- 
siah in opposition to the entire community, an idea 
diametrically opposed to the popular idea, was cer- 
tainly audacious, and could hardly meet with any- 
thing but fierce resentment. 

The Messianic self-consciousness of Jesus was 
not exhausted by the elements which we have now 
considered. It was quite as impossible for him to 
conceive of suffering and death as the final out- 
come of his Messiahship as for the people generally 
to accept this consummation. Suffering and death 
there might be, there must be ; but, if he was truly 
the Messiah, beyond the suffering and death there 
must be victorious compensation ; and hence arose 
in the mind of Jesus, and grew at length into im- 
mense and overshadowing — nay, all-illuminating — 
bulk, the idea that after his death he would return 
to earth again to establish the Messianic kingdom 
of peace and righteousness. This idea did not cor- 
respond to his immediate resurrection as afterward 



158 THE MAN JESUS. 

conceived by the primitive Christians. It corre- 
sponded with the second coming, which after his 
(imagined) resurrection filled with a vague unrest 
the bosom of the Christian community. He had 
said that this second coming would take place 
within the lifetime of his disciples, but their suc- 
cessors went on hoping against hope for many gen- 
erations. Does the fact that Jesus cherished such 
a hope seem to you an impeachment of the sound- 
ness of his mind ? Does it seem to remand him at 
once and forever to the order of fanatics ? These 
derogatory conclusions are forbidden by the cir- 
cumstances of the case. The expectation which 
he cherished of his second coming was not some- 
thing entirely peculiar to himself. A constituent 
part of the popular Messianic conception was that 
the faithful dead would reappear at the inaugura- 
tion of the Messianic kingdom. Believing this, 
Jesus could not believe that he, the Messiah, 
would not share in this general reappearance. It 
was not his difference from others but his con- 
scious likeness to them that made such a belief 
inevitable. He did not anticipate a future special 
to himself, but a fortune common to many. The 
clew to his mental process here is given in that 
saying of Paul, " If we rise not, then is Christ not 
risen." His resurrection .was implied in the gen- 
eral resurrection of the faithful dead. No special 
exaltation, therefore, was implied in his idea of his 



JESUS AS MESSIAH. 159 

second coming, but only his conformity in this 
particular, as in many others, with the received 
opinions of his time. 

Not only did the average opinion that the Mes- 
siah must finally triumph, impose itself on the 
mind of Jesus, and the average opinion that the 
faithful dead would reappear, assist him to believe 
in his own reappearance, but his favorite passages 
of ancient prophecy came to his aid and enabled 
him to reconcile his conception of a suffering Mes- 
siah with the idea of his final triumph; for in 
these passages the suffering Servant of Jehovah 
was represented as being finally victorious ; thus : 
" Behold my servant shall prosper ; he shall be ex- 
alted and extolled and be very high. As many 
were astonished at him, so many nations shall 
exalt him. Kings shall shut their mouths before 
him. When he hath made his soul an offering for 
sin, he shall prolong his days, and the pleasure of 
the Lord shall prosper in his hand. He shall see 
of the travail of his soul and shall be satisfied. I 
will divide him a portion with the great, and he 
shall divide the spoil with the strong, because he 
has poured out his soul unto death; and he was 
numbered with transgressors." It is in vain to sug- 
gest that, critically considered, there are many points 
in this delineation which do not correspond to the 
character of Jesus or his fate. Jesus was not a 
critic. Undoubtedly this delineation was intended 



160 THE MAN JESUS. 

for " the true Israel," or, if for some individual, one 
whose experience had already made it good. Nev- 
ertheless, to Jesus it was prophetic of his own 
character, of his own career, ending apparently in 
shame and ignominious death, but after death re- 
sumed and going on to victory, and to a universal 
empire over the conscience of mankind. 

Does it take anything from the heroism of Jesus 
to admit that, beyond the suffering and ignominy, 
he saw the triumph of his cause ? I think not. 
He knew that he must bear the suffering and ig- 
nominy with only 'the resources of his mortal 
nature to fall back upon. Doubtless it fortified 
his will to think of the subsequent triumph, but 
not more than it always fortifies the will of the 
martyr to anticipate the triumph of his cause 
after his death, and in part because of it. John 
Brown was firm in his assurance that his death 
would " pay " its cost. No doubt this high assur- 
ance fortified his will, but that it took anything 
from his heroism I have never for a moment 
dreamed. 

With what details Jesus imagined the sublime 
catastrophe which would accompany his reappear- 
ance after death, it is difficult to determine ; with 
many less, quite certainly, than we should gather 
from the predictions which are ascribed to him in 
the New Testament. In Luke, especially, these 
predictions are evidently colored by the facts of 



JESUS AS MESSIAH. 161 

which the writer was aware concerning the de- 
struction of Jerusalem. In Matthew, we approach 
more nearly to the original tradition ; but the 
views of Jesus, on this head, must have been ex- 
ceedingly indefinite. From Daniel, it is likely that 
he borrowed the idea of a " coming in the clouds of 
heaven." His favorite designation of himself as 
"the Son of Man" made this almost inevitable, 
once he had resolved to assume the role of the 
Messiah, for the Son of Man in Daniel is spoken 
of as coming in the clouds of heaven. Only this, 
however, is certain: that the Messianic self-con- 
sciousness of Jesus included the anticipation of 
his return to the earth after his death, to establish 
the kingdom of heaven. The criticism which en- 
deavors to make it appear that the conceptions 
ascribed to Jesus here are entirely the reflection 
of the apostolic community is not thoroughly ra- 
tional. It is necessary to ascribe these concep- 
tions to Jesus, in order to account for the hold 
they had upon the primitive Christian commu- 
nity. 

When Jesus resolved upon his Messianic charac- 
ter at Caesarea-Philippi, the Galileans were already 
making their preparations to go up to Jerusalem 
to the great spring feast, — that of the Passover. 
Jesus had little inclination to resume his Galilean 
ministry. Better, he thought, to take an entirely 
fresh field for the assertion of his Messianic dig- 

11 



162 THE MAN JESUS. 

nity. Besides, the idea that the Messiah would 
make his appearance in Jerusalem was too deeply 
ingrained in the popular -mind not to affect the 
mind of Jesus ; nor was a moral reason wanting 
for his journey thither. Jerusalem was the strong- 
hold of the pedantry and formalism which he had 
come to regard as the principal obstacles in the 
path of the Messiah. As the Messiah, he must 
confront the ecclesiastical formalism of Jerusalem 
on its own ground, assert his claim full in its face, 
summon it to unconditional surrender, and then, if 
need be, die, the more effectually to overwhelm it 
with the condemnation that would be sure to follow 
on his death. Once having resolved upon this 
course, " how was he straitened " till he had started 
on the way of its accomplishment. He allowed 
himself brief parting-time in Galilee. If he in- 
dulged his heart in any leave-taking with the family 
at Nazareth, no record of it has been preserved. 
It is only in the Fourth Gospel that his mother 
appears in Jerusalem, and at the foot of his cross. 
It is altogether improbable that she either went with 
him or followed him, considering the silence of the 
Synoptists. The " Stabat Mater " is still an ex- 
cellent theme for the musician, but it is without 
any historical foundation. Quis est homo, qui non 
fieret ? In the absence of Mary there is more abun- 
dant cause for tears. 

It was late in February when Jesus announced 



JESUS AS MESSIAH. 163 

his Messiahship to his disciples in the north ; and 
it was a month later, or a little more, when he 
bade farewell forever to the towns and villages 
where he had loved and been loved so much, and 
to the beautiful sea whose waters had imaged for 
him both the serenity and the agitation of his 
spirit. He sailed them now for the last time, on 
the first stage of his journey, landing on the south- 
east coast and taking his way through the country 
east of the Jordan. The more common route was 
through Samaria. Jesus avoided this in order, we 
may surmise, to be more alone with his disciples. 
He found it very difficult to fascinate them with 
his conception of the suffering Messiah. "Be it 
far from thee," said Peter. In spite of his contin- 
ual warnings they persisted in believing that, hav- 
ing once declared himself in Jerusalem, victory 
would come and perch upon his banner ; nor is it 
by any means unlikely that the natural buoyancy 
and hopefulness of his disposition asserted them- 
selves at times, so as to overbear the rationalized 
conviction of his mind. At such times his expec- 
tations would assume a less sombre hue. Still, to 
prepare the minds and hearts of his disciples for 
the worst, must have been the most engrossing ob- 
ject of his care during the journey through the 
Persea. Crossing the Jordan in that vicinity 
where only a year before he had received the bap- 
tism of John, the recent fate of the Baptist must 



164 THE MAN JESUS. 

have been to him terribly suggestive of his own. 
Nevertheless, he held upon his way. To this jour- 
ney, and to the weeks immediately preceding and 
following it, belongs all that is darkest, sternest, 
fiercest, in the teachings of Jesus, — the lurid 
visions of judgment, the hot denunciations of the 
self-righteousness and hypocrisy of the scribes and 
Pharisees; but to this journey also, and to him 
in the fullest consciousness of his Messianic mis- 
sion, as if to rebuke in advance any attempt to 
deduce from this consciousness the negation of his 
pure humanity, belongs the saying to " the rich 
young man," who called him "Good Master;" 
" Why callest thou me good ? There is one only 
who is good, and that is God." 

Many were the lessons of prudence and forbear- 
ance that Jesus impressed upon his eager and pas- 
sionate disciples as they journeyed on from one 
station to another of their pilgrim track. Short as 
the journey was from the valley of the Jordan up to 
Jerusalem, it involved an ascent of three thousand 
feet, through a populous district much of the way, 
but exceedingly barren, once Jericho and its groves 
of stately palm-trees had been left behind. With 
this section of the journey, synchronize the last at- 
tempts of Jesus to enamour his disciples with his 
conception of the Messianic kingdom triumphing 
through his sufferings and death. They had ears for 
the final triumph, none for the intermediate catas- 



JESUS AS MESSIAH. 165 

trophe. We see the mother of James and John 
beseeching for her sons the two best places in 
the approaching kingdom of heaven. We hear the 
reply of Jesus, " Can ye drink of the cup that I 
must drink of, and be baptized with the baptism 
that I am baptized with ? " They think it possible ; 
but he can make no promises. We see the indig- 
nation of the Ten at the underhanded attempt of 
James and John to influence Jesus in their favor 
through their mother. We hear the rebuke of Je- 
sus : "He that would be greatest among you let him 
be your servant." Arrived at Jericho, he made 
his home with the chief tax-gatherer of the city, 
the publican of publicans, as such the most de- 
spised of all its citizens. This act was his first 
challenge to the hierarchy of Judea on its own 
soil. The news of it, we may be sure, preceded 
Jesus to Jerusalem. The little band of his disci- 
ples was now receiving frequent accessions, mainly 
of Galilean folk upon their way to the great 
feast. From Jericho to Jerusalem the distance 
was eighteen miles, which were easily accom- 
plished between the morning and the evening of a 
single day. A league beyond Jericho the scenery 
becomes suddenly barren. The roadway leads 
through steep, rocky defiles, — between mountains 
clothed with scanty verdure ; but the dreariness of 
their surroundings could not damp the ardor of 
the growing crowd which now surrounded the 



166 THE MAN JESUS. 

Galilean prophet and his immediate friends. As 
the day advanced the enthusiasm increased, and 
Jesus made no attempt to chill it with his dark 
forebodings. It may be that he questioned with 
himself whether, after all, he had not reckoned 
with himself too sternly, whether the bitter cup 
might not even now be changed to honey on his 
lips. Again the scenery changes. The Mount of 
Olives rises into view. Behind that, the pilgrims 
know, is all the splendor of Jerusalem. They 
climb its eastern slope and come to pleasant Beth- 
any embosomed among verdurous hills ; and then, 
a little way beyond, the top is reached, and look- 
ing westward they behold the Holy City lying 
at their feet, — a city of grim towers and lordly 
palaces and magnificent royal gardens, the temple 
overtopping all. How its long rows of marble 
columns and its roof of plated gold must have 
flashed and gleamed in the slant rays of the declin- 
ing sun ! A vision so inspiring might well pro- 
duce a higher exaltation in the minds of Jesus and 
his followers. The journey now became a triumph. 
An ass was borrowed from some friendly person, 
and Jesus, who had always gone on foot, as if to 
mark the greater dignity of this occasion, allowed 
his disciples to saddle the creature with their gar- 
ments, and so rode on to Bethphage, down by the 
Garden of Gethsemane, over the brook Kedron, 
then up again to the Sheep-gate, and so, at length, 



JESUS AS MESSIAH. 167 

into the city, — that magnet which had drawn him 
from the base of Hermon with irresistible attrac- 
tion. Nothing would satisfy the disciples and the 
friends of Jesus, and even the strangers who could 
not resist the contagion of their earnestness, but to 
spread their garments for the ass to tread upon 
with leaves and branches from the adjacent fields, 
while, waving branches of the palm-tfee to and fro, 
they cried, " Hosanna ! Blessed is he that cometh 
in the name of the Lord ! " 

The narrative of these events, as it is written 
in the New Testament, abounds in features that 
are evidently the dogmatic reflections of a later 
time. Apparently this triumphal entry was a spon- 
taneous outburst of enthusiasm confined within 
narrow limits. It may be that Jesus hoped these 
limits would extend until they should comprise an 
effective majority of the population of the city, 
and that so, perhaps without a struggle, the hier- 
archy would be overthrown and his own kingdom 
set up in its place. It may be, he had spoken of 
these things with them so frequently, that he al- 
lowed himself to think that his disciples were 
completely disabused of their materialistic notions 
of his Messiahship ; but from all that we can glean 
concerning them, we may be sure that they were 
not. Already they imagined themselves sitting on 
twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel. 
Jesus is made to promise them this honor in one 



168 THE MAN JESUS. 

of the worst distortions of the New Testament tra- 
dition. It was their triumph quite as much as 
his own that they were celebrating as they spread 
their garments in his way. 

Once in the city, it was only a short distance to 
the temple-area, and thither, less it would seem in 
obedience to any preconcerted plan, than because 
swept along by a great common impulse, went the 
enthusiastic crowd. It is in vain that we endeavor 
to imagine with what emotions Jesus entered the 
sacred precinct. The sight that greeted him he 
had seen before, but then it was with reverence 
almost unmixed with any other feeling. Now all 
was changed. If he knew his own heart, it was 
entirely alienated from this magnificent and costly 
ritual. But it was so imposing that his temerity 
in expecting that he could grapple with it and 
overthrow it must have seemed to him, then and 
there, almost a madman's fancy. His mood was, 
however, too exalted to permit him to take counsel 
for a moment with any doubt or fear. Immedi- 
ately the acclamations of his retinue were drowned 
amid the various din and uproar of the temple- 
court, — the mutter of prayers, the chanting of 
hymns, the clink of coin, the lowing of oxen, the 
bleating of sheep, the chaffering and shouting of 
the buyers and sellers of the sacrificial animals 
and the wine and oil and other things necessary to 
the routine of sacrifice. Instantly at sight and 



JESUS AS MESSIAH. 169 

hearing of these things the enthusiasm of Jesus 
culminated in an act of almost inconceivable dar- 
ing. With whip in hand he overturned the tables 
of the money-changers, and drove their occupants 
and the dove-sellers and cattle-dealers from their 
booths and stalls, crying as he did so, " It is written, 
my house shall be called a house of prayer, but y£ 
have made it a den of thieves." In the full tide 
of the Passover such an act would have been im- 
possible, and at any time it justifies a sceptical ap- 
proach ; but we must remember that in the bones 
of every Jew lurked a certain reverence for the 
prophetic office, and a fear of spurning as an im- 
postor a veritable messenger of God. We must re- 
member, too, that one man, armed with the strength 
of personal conviction, has ever been a terror to a 
crowd of mercenary formalists. In this act of Je- 
sus there is nothing improbable, if we make due 
allowance for the intensity of his enthusiasm, and 
the character of the people on whose backs he laid 
the nearest whip at hand. 

The hierarchy could not, if it would/see in this 
act of Jesus merely a rebuke of the dishonesty of 
the temple-traffickers. Their traffic was essential to 
the temple-ritual. The act of Jesus was a condem- 
nation of this ritual. So, at any rate, it must have 
been regarded, and from this moment we may re- 
gard the fate of Jesus as sealed. Did he himself 
regret his action, as, in the deepening twilight, he 



170 THE MAN JESUS. 

drew apart with his disciples out of the city, to 
spend the night with friends in Bethany ? It is 
not unlikely. If he could have deliberately chosen 
his initiative it would have been different from 
this. He would have besought the hierarchy and 
the people to forsake their toilsome ceremonial for 
his ritual of righteousness. He would have begun 
in love and not in wrath ; but circumstances had 
determined otherwise for him. The die was cast. 
No backward step was possible. 

Jesus had anticipated the crowd of pilgrims, and 
had two or three weeks at his disposal before the 
feast of the Passover. Every evening we must im- 
agine him leaving the city, and retiring beyond the 
brow of Olivet to spend the night with some new- 
made friend in Bethany. A majority of the pil- 
grims to the feasts were always housed in the 
outlying villages ; but this resting-place may have 
been further determined by the desire of Jesus to 
prolong his life at least until the Passover, and it 
was not long before he knew that emissaries of the 
Pharisaic party were upon his track. Early every 
morning we must imagine him again returning to 
the city, and to the fore-court of the temple or 
the temple-synagogue. Here there was no lack of 
opportunity for the exposition of his doctrine of 
religion. At first his attitude seems to have been 
rather defensive than aggressive. A certain shrewd- 
ness is a notable characteristic of the mind of Je- 



JESUS AS MESSIAH. 171 

sus. Educated as a rabbi, he would have been a 
match for any rabbi in the land in textual fence. 
With such training as he had he was always equal 
to the occasion. Frequently the arguments with 
which he met his opponents are without any ab- 
solute validity, but as arguments ad hominem they 
could hardly be improved. One of the devices of 
his enemies was to identify him with the move- 
ment of the Zealots, which within a few years had 
attained to great importance under the lead of Judas 
the Gaulonite. The leading principle of Judas 
was that it was not admissible for a faithful Jew 
to pay a tax to Eome. The question put to Jesus? 
" Is it lawful to pay tribute unto Caesar ? " was in- 
tended to commit him to the principles of the Zeal- 
ots. The reply of Jesus, " Eender unto Caesar the 
things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things 
that are God's," was certainly a subterfuge, but it 
turned the edge of the attack. A criticism, per- 
haps too genial, has found in this reply a sugges- 
tion that rendering to God his own, the Eoman 
tax would be forever done away. Such may have 
been the thought of Jesus, but we must not refine 
too much upon his words. 

The days went by, and each in turn brought 
with it fresh and more dangerous complications. 
To these days belongs the parable of the Two Sons, 
one who said, "I go," and went not, while the 
other said, " I go not," and yet went, followed up" 



172 THE MAN JESUS. 

by that terrible saying, " The publicans and harlots 
shall go into the kingdom of heaven before you." 
To these days belongs the story of the woman 
taken in adultery, an interpolation in the Fourth 
Gospel, but a valid piece of primitive tradition. 
Jesus was a strict constructionist of the law of 
marriage; divorce on any ground he could not 
justify; the exception of the Gospels is not his; 
but the spontaneous crime of the woman who was 
brought to him seemed venial in comparison with 
the Pharisaical casuistry of divorce. Here was 
another terrible offence. But there came a day 
when all the indignation which had for months 
been gathering in his heart against the ceremonial- 
ism of the time, but which had only shown itself 
fitfully, burst every barrier and sent a flood of lava- 
like denunciation flaming and scorching into the 
midst of his antagonists, the purists of the syna- 
gogue and temple. "Woe unto you, scribes and 
Pharisees, hypocrites ! for ye pay tithe of mint, 
anise, and cumin, and have omitted the weightier 
matters of the law, — justice, mercy, and fidelity. 
Blind guides that you are, straining out gnats and 
swallowing camels. Woe unto you, scribes and 
Pharisees ! for ye make clean the outside of the cup 
and platter, but the inside is full of extortion and 
impurity. Blind Pharisee, cleanse first that which 
is within the cup and the platter, and then the out- 
side will be clean also. Woe unto you, scribes 



JESUS AS MESSIAH. 173 

and Pharisees, hypocrites ! for you are like white- 
washed sepulchres, that seem all pure without, but 
within are full of dead men's bones and all un- 
cleanness. Even so you outwardly appear right- 
eous, but within you are full of hypocrisy and 
iniquity. You serpents, you generation of vipers, 
how can you escape the damnation of hell ? " This 
is no feeble rage. Such words as these came from 
the lips of no such lackadaisical Jesus as Christian 
art has everywhere inflicted on mankind. The 
picture has yet to be painted which shall be as 
manly as he was ; and let this be noted carefully, 
that the dizzying height, the dazzling brilliancy, of 
his Messianic self-consciousness had not obscured 
for him one line of his original " good tidings." At 
the heart of these withering denunciations is the 
same gospel of character — to he and not to seem — 
which was at the heart of the first kindly utter- 
ances of the Galilean spring-time. Let us do Je- 
sus so much of simple justice. Let us confess that 
the most passionate vagaries of his Messianic dream 
were correlated with moral principles, as simple as 
they were sublime. The particular moral precepts 
of Jesus will not, in every instance, bear the strain 
of social science, and of wide experience. His 
principles, subordinating ceremonial to social con- 
duct, and social conduct to private character, are 
the same immutable and glorious principles, yes- 
terday, to-day, and forever. 



174 THE MAN JESUS. 

The New Testament is entirely silent in regard 
to the relations of Jesus to " the common people " 
while he was at Jerusalem, unless we have a hint of 
failure to enlist them on his side in the charge he 
brings against the scribes and Pharisees : " Hypo- 
crites that you are ! for you shut men out of the 
kingdom of heaven. You will not enter your- 
selves, and you forbid and prevent those who 
would ! " This would seem to indicate that the 
scribes and Pharisees had frustrated his attempt to 
marshal the common people under his flag. The 
parable of the vintner who sent his own son to 
gather the fruit of his vineyard, after he had sent 
various servants, marks, very possibly, the hottest 
point of controversy before the final catastrophe. 
The husbandmen of the parable take the son and 
drag him outside of the vineyard and kill him. 
Here, in one breath, Jesus distinctly avows his 
Messianic claim, which he had kept more or 
less in the background, and the nature of his ex- 
pectations. The more pious in the community 
hastened to make these expectations good. In 
this particular they would on no account have 
had him disappointed. On Tuesday evening, the 
twelfth Msan (the month Msan of that time cor- 
responded very nearly with our April), there was 
a meeting at the house of the ex-high-priest Caia- 
phas, to see what might be ventured in order to 
compass the destruction of Jesus. It was resolved 



JESUS AS MESSIAH. 175 

to delay action until after the Passover ; but on the 
thirteenth there came to certain of the Sanhedrin 
one of the twelve disciples of Jesus, Judas of Keri- 
oth, and for thirty shekels of silver (about twenty 
dollars) agreed to deliver Jesus into their hands, 
and to do this before the Passover. A bait so 
tempting was of course swallowed at once, and at 
a bound Judas obtained immortal infamy. He has 
had his defenders. What traitor has not, sooner 
or later ? It has been argued that he was impatient 
to consummate the destruction of Jesus, so that 
his subsequent triumph might be the more quickly 
assured. This is not likely. Nor is it likely that 
his aim was mercenary. Of all surmises, the most 
rational is that he was disappointed by the Messi- 
anic ideal of Jesus. His own was the popular 
ideal. The ideal of Jesus was so different that he 
felt himself deceived and wronged. A suffering 
Messiah, indeed ! What fulfilment was there here 
of the great national hope, or of his own ambition 
to sit upon a throne ruling one of the twelve tribes 
of Israel ? Whatever the motive, the act remains. 
On Wednesday evening Jesus was betrayed al- 
ready, and Judas only waited for a favorable op- 
portunity to carry out his iniquitous design. 

Thursday, the fourteenth Msan, must have been 
a busy day for the priests and temple-servants of 
Jerusalem. At the Passover of A. D. 66, Josephus 
would have us believe that two hundred and fifty- 



176 THE MAN JESUS. 

six thousand lambs were slaughtered. This may 
be a fivefold exaggeration. Let us say fifty thou- 
sand. No doubt as many as this were sacrificed in 
the year of Jesus' death ; and all of these must 
be carried to the temple, to be examined by the 
priests before they could be killed. Pronounced 
without blemish, they were handed over to their 
o.wners to be killed upon the spot, " the priests in 
two long rows receiving the blood in gold and sil- 
ver vessels," and passing it along till it was poured 
out at the foot of the altar. Then the animals 
were skinned, and certain parts were left before 
the altar while the rest was carried home to be 
roasted for the evening. The disciples of Jesus, 
unnoticed among thousands of Galileans, brought 
their lamb to the temple, and in the evening Jesus 
found that every preparation had been made for 
eating the feast of the Passover at the house of 
some friendly person. This feast was ordinarily 
an exceedingly joyous occasion. It was a hearty 
meal, and wine was drunk freely, two glasses being 
allowed after " the cup of blessing," which was the 
third. Its character has been obscured in popular 
estimation by the " Lord's Supper," with its nomi- 
nal eating and drinking. But " the last supper " of 
Jesus with his disciples was not a joyful occasion. 
The Master's mind was too intensely fixed on his 
immediate future. For many days he had felt the 
coils tightening around him. He knew that they 



JESUS AS MESSIAH. 177 

would crush him soon. " How have I longed/' he 
said, " to eat this Passover with you, for I shall not 
eat it again till it be the true feast of redemption in 
the kingdom of God." But he had special reasons 
for disquietude. A vague suspicion haunted him 
that one of the twelve had gftne over to the enemy. 
It may be that something in the manner of Judas 
singled him out as the traitor. Matthew represents 
him as saying " Is it I ? " and Jesus as answering, 
"Yes." Only those who believe everything will 
believe this. 

What would we not give for any faithful account 
of the words of Jesus upon this occasion, — the 
last evening of his life ! Let us hope that among 
them there were tender reminiscences of his life in 
Galilee, and gracious messages for the family in 
Nazareth who had been so little able to sympathize 
with him or to comprehend his spirit. But nat- 
urally it was the future which engrossed his 
thoughts most deeply. Words of warning and en- 
couragement that had been many times spoken 
must be again enforced. Then, in the spirit of the 
ancient prophets, he performed a symbolic action. 
Breaking the bread and giving it to his disciples, 
he said, " Eat, it is my body." Passing the cup to 
them he said, " This is my blood of the covenant 
that shall flow for the salvation of many. Of a 
truth I tell you that I shall never again drink of 
this Paschal wine till I drink it new in the estab- 

12 



178 THE MAN JESUS. 

lished kingdom of God." In Luke and Paul we 
have the statement that Jesus asked his disciples 
when they ate and drank together to hold him in 
remembrance. Never was anything more simple ! 
Never was anything more natural ! But to what 
manifold distortion have the Christian ages sub- 
jected that simple action and those simple words ! 
From the words, " This is my body," in the course 
of eight hundred years the Eoman Church devel- 
oped the doctrine of transubstantiation, — that the 
bread of the eucharist is bread no longer, but liter- 
ally and only the human body of God ; and Protes- 
tantism still speaks as confidently as ever of " the 
institution of the Lord's Supper." There was no 
institution. There was an act of natural human 
tenderness. The occasion determined the form of 
his expression. He would have been infinitely 
sadder than he was if he had dreamed what san- 
guinary systems of theology would be built upon 
his figures of speech. He did but ask of his disci- 
ples that, till his second coming, as often as they 
ate the Paschal bread and drank its ruddy wine, 
they would remember how his body had been 
broken and his blood had flowed for the establish- 
ment of new and higher relations between man 
and man, and between man and God. Oh, the 
pity of it ; — that from an action and from words 
so simple and humane, should have come doctrines 
and practices more foreign to the mind of Jesus 



JESUS AS MESSIAH. 179 

than any he endeavored to abolish by his life and 

death ! 

" And when they had sung a hymn they went 

out." The hymn was the usual hymn sung upon 
this occasion. It was near midnight, and Bethany 
was some three miles away, — between two and 
three. The oppression of Jesus grew deeper as 
they walked along. It may be that he noticed 
that Judas was no longer with the rest. Upon 
the way they came to an olive garden where there 
was an olive press that gave to the place its name 
— Gethsemane. That garden is almost too sacred 
for our thought to enter. The nature of that in- 
ward struggle of which it was the melancholy 
scene, we cannot fully know. Touching and sweet 
as are the words ascribed to Jesus, we cannot be 
certain that he uttered them, for his disciples were 
asleep, and he could not have repeated them ; and 
yet we may not doubt that the narrator has fully 
entered into the spirit of that hour. " Father, if it 
be possible, let this cup pass from me." What 
was the cup that was so bitter to his taste ? The 
cup of shame and death, death in its most horrible 
form. The agony in Gethsemane was the last and 
sharpest struggle between his natural, human sen- 
sibility and the imperious exigencies of his ideal. 
Because this man was human he was in love with 
life. Because he must think of himself as the 
Messiah he had doomed himself to death. He did 



180 THE MAN JESUS. 

himself injustice by his antithesis, " The spirit in- 
deed is willing, but the flesh is weak." It was his 
spirit, not his flesh merely, that drew back from 
such a doom. What was the outcome of this ter- 
rible inward struggle ? Again we cannot help 
feeling that the narrator has divined it well : 
" Father, if this cup cannot pass away till I have 
drunk it, thy will be done ! " 

Jesus would go no further on his way to Bethany 
that night. He had just returned to his disciples 
when Judas made his appearance at the head of a 
mixed company of temple soldiers and high priest's 
retainers, and indicated to them their victim with a 
treacherous kiss, the prototype of all kissing treach- 
ery from that day to this. You would not have me 
enter fully into the details of the remaining hours 
of Jesus' life. You know how he was taken to 
the house of Caiaphas, and in the last hours of the 
night put upon his trial before the Sanhedrin. 
Jewish scholars have assured us that the Sanhe- 
drin was not regularly convened, and that the con- 
demnation of Jesus was by a faction which had no 
regular authority. Certainly the proceedings were 
hasty. The members of the Sanhedrin must have 
been in ill humor at their early summons ; but 
under the most favorable circumstances only one 
result was possible. There was abundant evidence 
that Jesus had been guilty of blasphemy, or, as we 
should say, of heresy. Asked if he were the Mes- 



JESUS AS MESSIAH. 181 

siah, he made no denial. Here was no ground for 
his conviction, but it was clear that his ideas were 
subversive of the existing order of religion. Doubt- 
less the members of the Sanhedrin did what they 
thought was right. Their sacred books, which all 
Christians but the merest handful consider the in- 
fallible word of God, commanded them expressly 
to put to death any prophet who should not con- 
form to the received traditions. Jesus did not 
conform to these. Therefore his sentence was in- 
evitable and, if the Old Testament is an infallible 
revelation, absolutely just and right. 

Through the chill morning hours Jesus was made 
the laughing-stock of brutal clowns, and buffeted 
by their rude hands. At day-break the Sanhedrin 
was again convened, and a deputation of its mem- 
bers, taking Jesus with them, went to the Procura- 
tor, Pontius Pilate, to get his confirmation of their 
sentence of death, and his directions as to the man- 
ner of its execution. Their own law prescribed 
stoning,- but, merciful as such a death would have 
been compared with the crucifixion, they had no 
executive power. Pilate was sufficiently cruel and 
bloodthirsty, but his hatred of the Jews made him 
suspicious of their justice in this matter. It was 
in Jesus' favor that they wished for his destruction ; 
and something in the presence and bearing of Je- 
sus may have impressed him. It was his custom 
to release a prisoner to the people at every Pass- 



182 THE MAN JESUS. 

over. He now gave them their choice between 
Jesus of Nazareth and another Jesus (for Jesus 
was by no means an uncommon name), whose sur- 
name was Barabbas, a seditious person who had 
killed a Eoman soldier in a brawl. To his aston- 
ishment the crowd preferred Jesus the Zealot to 
Jesus the Messiah, and the latter was condemned 
to die upon the cross. 

It was a fearful death for any man to die. Fre- 
quently the torture lasted two or three days, the 
victim finally perishing from hunger or nervous 
exhaustion. In the case of Jesus, death was not 
so long delayed. His sufferings lasted only some 
six or eight hours. The women of Jerusalem were 
allowed the privilege of giving to the crucified a 
benumbing or intoxicating potion. This was of- 
fered to Jesus but refused. Not one of the twelve 
was there to witness either his sufferings or this 
heroic act of self-denial; but Mary of Magdala, 
Mary Cleophas, and Salome (whose sons had van- 
ished with the rest of the apostles), were there 
with thoughts that were "too deep for tears." 
These are our only witnesses of the last hours of 
Jesus, and it is not likely that we owe to these any 
of the utterances ascribed to Jesus in the New Tes- 
tament. Beautiful and suggestive as are some of 
these, they are probably the inventions of a loving 
imagination and not the records of what was actu- 
ally said. Before sunset, soon after three o'clock it 



JESUS AS MESSIAH. 183 

is most likely, his head sank on his breast and his 
heart ceased its beating. Never was one, who loved 
his fellow-men so much, more cruelly destroyed. 

Left to themselves the Eomans would have al- 
lowed his body to remain for birds of prey to feed 
upon, but it was a Jewish custom to give decent 
burial even to the most abandoned criminal. The 
legend runs that, in the case of Jesus, one Joseph 
of Arimathea, of whom we have this mention only, 
begged for his body and, having obtained it, per- 
formed for it the last sad offices with all duty and 
affection. " And there was Mary Magdalene and 
the other Mary sitting over against the sepulchre." 

The concern of the biographer ends with Jesus, 
as with every other person, at his death. His im- 
agined resurrection and his speculative deification 
belong to the history of ideas not to the biography 
of the man. We are persuaded that an immediate 
resurrection formed no part of his conception of 
his future, so that in this particular he was not dis- 
appointed; but that he did expect to return to 
earth at some time in no distant future we are as 
certain as need be, and absolutely certain that he 
did not so return. Nevertheless, his firm convic- 
tion that his cause would triumph through his death 
was justified by the event. The religion of Jesus, 
not without various corruption and distortion, but 
with conscious allegiance to his sacred name, is the 
religion of three hundred millions of the civilized 



184 THE MAN JESUS. 

world. Could anything seem more unlikely as he 
hung upon the cross that April day, with only 
three women in the world as his confessed disciples ? 
And yet it was his dying so that made Christianity 
a universal religion. " Never was that which bore 
the outward* appearance of ruin and annihilation 
turned into such signal and decisive victory as in 
the death of Jesus." 1 As Theodore Parker .said : 
" A live man may hurt his own cause ; a dead one 
cannot soil his clean, immortal doctrines with un- 
worthy hands." So long as Jesus lived there was 
danger that his and the popular conception of the 
Messiah would approximate to each other, that 
some sort of a compromise would be effected. The 
result of such a compromise would certainly have 
been that Christianity would have been only an- 
other Jewish sect, or that Judaism would have 
absorbed it altogether. In either case it would not 
have been a universal religion. From that day to 
this Judaism has had a record which is not inglo- 
rious, however little glory it reflects upon ' the 
Christian world ; but Judaism was too intensely 
jaational in its instincts ever to become a universal 
faith. The death of Jesus on the cross made it 
forever impossible for the Jews to allow his Messi- 
anic claim. Paul,~seeing in that death the aboli- 
tion of the Jewish law, anticipated the last result 
of our historical science. The actual triumph of 

1 Baur's Christian History. Vol. I., p. 41. 



JESUS AS MESSIAH. 185 

Jesus dwarfs his apocalyptic vision; and such a 
triumph would have been impossible but for his 
ignominious death. 

I am aware how dreadfully inadequate must be 
any representation of the life and character of Jesus 
within the limits I have allowed myself in these 
discourses ; but, if I have sketched even the out- 
lines of his life and character with tolerable exact- 
ness, any frequenter of the churches of the popular 
religion might well question with himself whether 
I have not made some great mistake, whether it is 
really possible that I have been talking about the 
same person who is called Jesus Christ in orthodox 
circles, and worshipped as the second person in the 
Trinity, as a being coeternal and coequal with God. 
The same and not the same. Jesus of Nazareth 
could not have been the person I have depicted, 
and at the same time or at any time have been the 
second person in the Trinity, a being coeternal 
and coequal with God ; but it is as the person I 
have depicted, and not as the second person of the 
Trinity, that he appears in the New Testament, 
when due allowance has been made for the origin 
and character of the different books that make up 
our sources of information. Jesus of Nazareth, as 
I have drawn him, was a man ; a man with an in- 
comparable genius for religion ; a man of invincible 
conscience and immeasurable love ; a man limited 
in many ways by the conceptions of his time but 



186 THE MAN JESUS. 

making, even of the most irrational of these concep- 
tions, channels through which he poured the natural 
goodness of his heart in a great tide of vivifying 
and exalting power. Almost as different as possi- 
ble from the theological God-Man of the churches, 
in the fulness of his human personality he was one 
whom we can hardly reverence too much ; one the 
disparity of whose ideal and actual experience we 
cannot pity so much as it deserves ; and one, in 
view of all he was and all he did and all he hoped 
to do, " whom not having seen we love." 



VI. 



THE EESUEEEOTIOK 



" Where, then, is the force of that argument of despair, 
as we called it, that if St. Paul vouches for the bodily resur- 
rection of Jesus and for his appearance after it, and is mis- 
taken in so vouching, then he must be an imbecile and 
credulous enthusiast, untruthful, unprofitable ? We see 
that for a man to believe in preternatural incidents, of a 
kind admitted by the common belief of his time, proves 
nothing at all against his general truthfulness and sagacity. 
Nay, we see that even while affirming such preternatural 
incidents, he may with profound insight seize the true and 
natural aspect of them, the aspect which will survive and 
profit when the miraculous aspect has faded. He may give 
us, in the very same work, current error, and also fruitful 
and profound new truth, the error's future corrective." 

Matthew Arnold. 






VI, 

THE RESURRECTION. 



ROMAN" CATHOLICISM revolves preemi- 
nently around the doctrine of the incarnation. 
So do the broad and high parties in the Episcopa- 
lian church of England and America. Protestant- 
ism generally is preeminently devoted to the 
doctrine of the atonement. The doctrine of the 
resurrection is less exclusively the property of any 
great communion. It is almost, if not quite, equal- 
ly dear to Romanists and Protestants. In the first 
stages of Christian development, it occupied the 
foremost place in the mind of every Christian be- 
liever ; and from that time to this it has played a 
stupendous part upon the stage of Christian his- 
tory. To the average Christian believer, the resur- 
rection of Jesus from the dead has been and is the 
miracle of miracles ; the sole and all sufficing proof 
of immortality. Even within the limits of the 
Unitarian denomination there are clergymen who 
insist that without the resurrection of Jesus there 
is no ground for hope in immortality, but that this 






190 THE MAN JESUS. 

being given all is safe and sure. Thirty or fortj 
years ago this was the general attitude among Uni- 
tarians. The preacher spent his force in demon- 
strating the worthlessness of every natural argument. 
To believe in immortality on any ground save that 
of Jesus' resurrection was Deism in one of its most 
baleful forms. 

Some of you, I doubt not, think the matter 
hardly worth an hours consideration. The life of 
Jesus, such will say, perhaps, is one thing but his 
resurrection is another. The former has some 
human interest : the latter none. That Jesus lived 
and died is possible. That he rose from the dead 
is impossible. 

To which I answer, Yes and No. That Jesus 
rose from the dead I have no belief whatever ; but 
because other men (hundreds of millions of them) 
have a belief in his resurrection, and because thou- 
sands of millions have had this belief in the past, 
its human interest is inconceivably great. We 
cannot be indifferent to it. We cannot dismiss it 
with a sneer. It challenges our closest scrutiny. 
It is not as if it were a doctrine of the past. It is the 
accepted doctrine of the present time. Those who 
do not accept it form a small minority, a minority 
so small that, in comparison with the majority, it 
is inappreciable. Like Posthumus in " Cymbeline," 
it melts "from the smallness of a gnat to air." 
Article IV., of the Established Church of England, 



THE RESURRECTION. 191 

reads : " Christ did truly rise again from death, and 
took again his body with flesh, bones and all things 
appertaining to the perfection of man's nature, 
wherewith he ascended into heaven and there sit- 
teth, until he return to judge all men at the last 
day." This is one of the articles to which Dean 
Stanley subscribes, and hundreds of men as honest 
and intelligent as he. This is the doctrine of three 
hundred millions of Christian people. This is 
the doctrine of the New Testament as it stands. 
The article does not exceed the statements and the 
implications of the record, not " in the estimation 
of a hair." Does it seem presumptuous in us, even 
when we have added to ourselves all who agree 
with us, to oppose ourselves to a doctrine which 
has the suffrages of millions, of the Bible, and of 
history, and of thousands of very learned persons 
occupying high ecclesiastical positions ? It may 
seem so, but we cannot help it. But we can help 
some things. We can help any hap-hazard or con- 
temptuous rejection of a doctrine which is so 
widely accepted, so venerable, so dear. We can 
examine it carefully, conscientiously, in every aspect 
it presents, before we break with it forever. Not 
to do this would be presumptuous and this we must 
not be. 

At the same time we must give no heed to the 
voice of the charmer, charm he never so wisely, 
who would fain persuade us that the interest at 



192 THE MAN JESUS. 

stake should either warn us off from the considera- 
tion of this matter altogether, or should make us 
throw our prepossession into the scale with every 
argument for the resurrection of Jesus. The inter- 
est at stake is supposed to be our personal immor- 
tality. Substantially we are advised not to probe 
this matter too deeply lest we should find that it 
does not confirm our hope of a hereafter ; but if it 
does not we want to know it. Every man, who is 
a man, will say this. Only a coward will say any- 
thing else. The hope of immortality is too grand 
a hope to fortify itself with evidence which is con- 
sciously illusive. We do not want to pretend to 
believe; we want to believe; but knowing as we 
do that the hope of millions is based upon this be- 
lief would we do anything to weaken it? The 
rational religionist is frequently confronted with 
this appeal to his better nature. His answer ought 
to be : We do not flatter ourselves that we are go- 
ing to convert the world to our opinion in a day. 
The great majority will go on believing pretty much 
as they do now for many generations. Nothing that 
we think or say will make any great impression on 
this majority; but such as are able to receive it — 
the conclusion to which we have arrived — let 
them receive it. They will prefer it, as we do, 
to an illusory foundation for any hope, even the 
greatest. 

And if the magnitude of the issues at stake will 



THE RESURRECTION. 193 

not deter us altogether from the consideration of 
this matter, no more will it constitute, in and of it- 
self, an added force to every argument for the res- 
urrection of Jesus. Let us play no tricks with 
ourselves. The force of arguments on either side 
is not affected by the magnitude of the issues at 
stake, whatever be the matter under consideration. 
If the testimony in a recent trial, for example, was 
sufficient to convict the man of murder, it was not 
less so because his own life was involved ; it would 
not have been more so had there been no penalty. 
If the testimony for the resurrection of Jesus from 
the dead is sufficient to establish this as an historic 
fact, it is still sufficient, whatever is bound up in 
this conclusion. If the testimony is insufficient 
it is not made any less so by the fact, if fact it 
be, that our personal immortality is involved. 
We caniiot use the final implication to piece out 
the original foundation. We cannot say the founda- 
tion must be satisfactory because it is necessary 
to support such a magnificent superstructure. On 
the contrary the more magnificent the proposed 
superstructure, the more careful shall we be con- 
cerning the foundation. Could we be sure that 
the resurrection of Jesus would involve our per- 
sonal immortality we should scrutinize it no less 
sharply ; nay all the more sharply ; for we do not 
wish to cherish great beliefs and hopes on any 
doubtful evidence. 

13 



194 THE MAN JESUS. 

But does the resurrection of Jesus from the dead 
involve our personal immortality ? If his resur- 
rection could be proved would our immortality 
follow ? Christian theology answers, Yes. Eational 
religion answers emphatically, No ; and the won- 
der is that any man of ordinary intelligence can- 
not see that rational religion is right. Let us 
assume for the present that the resurrection of 
Jesus was a fact ; that dead as could be on Friday 
afternoon, on Sunday morning he was alive again, 
and was no mere phantom but a man of flesh and 
blood, with the marks of his crucifixion on his per 
son ; and that within a short time, with his cor- 
poreal substance, — in the language of the Article, 
" witlf his flesh and bones and all things appertaining 
to the perfection of man's nature " — he ascended 
into heaven. Assuming all this, where is the argu- 
ment for our personal immortality ? The resurrec- 
tion of Jesus is a resurrection of the body ; his 
ascension is an ascension of the body ; his immortal- 
ity is an immortality of the body. Now it is quite 
impossible for us to have any such resurrection, 
any such ascension, any such corporeal immortality. 
Our bodies moulder away. They mingle with the 
elements. They are taken up into vegetable and 
animal structures. What analogy can there be 
between our resurrection at some infinitely distant 
day and that of Jesus from twenty-four to thirty- 
six hours after his death ? There can be no anal- 



THE RESURRECTION. 195 

ogy whatever, and therefore there can be no argu- 
ment from the one thing to the other. 

Again in popular estimation, from the stand- 
point of Christian orthodoxy, the resurrection of 
Jesus from the dead was the crowning act of his 
miraculous career. It was in virtue of his super- 
human character that he triumphed over death ; 
but what argument is here for the resurrection of 
people who are not superhuman ? What man has 
done, man may do ; but it does not equally follow 
that he can do anything that has been done by a 
being whose nature and genius were entirely ex- 
ceptional. To prove anything universal the nature 
of Jesus should have been simply and entirely 
human. It was so in reality, but it is not so in 
the theory of his resurrection. It is necessary to 
this theory that he should have been sui generis, 
a being unlike any other. This or no resurrection ; 
but this being granted his resurrection if estab- 
lished would have no universal significance. It 
would not argue anything for you and me. Our 
hope of immortality would receive no accession, 
suffer no abatement, from his triumph. It would 
be entirely unaffected. 

Such being the relation of Jesus' resurrection 
to our personal immortality we can apprqach it 
without bias. The situation makes no such de- 
mand upon our honesty and courage as it would 
if the relation were that which is generally as- 



196 THE MAN JESUS. 

sumed. We can look at it in the dry light. We 
can ask, Is it, or is it not, a fact ? without regard 
to the ulterior consequence. We can do this at 
least so far as it concerns the matter of our per- 
sonal immortality; but the effort has been fre- 
quently made to establish a secondary bias in 
favor of the resurrection by insisting on the im- 
portance of the doctrine in the development of 
early Christianity. Perhaps no other argument for 
the resurrection has been insisted on so much as 
this. The development of early Christianity we are 
assured was one of the most remarkable and bene- 
ficent social transformations that the world has 
ever known, and we agree to this ; and then the ad- 
vocate of the resurrection goes on, " But if the res- 
urrection of Jesus was not a fact, then was the most 
remarkable and beneficent social transformation 
the world has ever known the result of an illusion." 
Here is a conclusion so unpalatable that it is as- 
sumed that rather than accept it we shall accept 
the resurrection ; but the implications of a result, 
however unpalatable, do not affect the arguments 
by which a result is established. If the testimony 
for the resurrection is insufficient it remains so, 
whatever this result implies. If the testimony 
against it is destructive it remains so, whatever 
be the implication. That an illusion contributed 
to the development of an important social change 
is doubtless an unpalatable result; but it is not 






THE RESURRECTION. 197 



so unpalatable as the fact of an actual resurrection 
from the dead would be to one whose intelligence 
had been educated to admire, whose heart had 
been inspired to trust, the habitual order of the 
world. Moreover nothing is surer than that illu- 
sion plays an important part in all the changes 
of history, for better and for worse. Finally, the 
resurrection doctrine was not the only force that 
was grandly operative in the development of early 
Christianity. The resurrection doctrine was one 
of many forces, an exceedingly important one, but 
in comparison with the aggregate of all the other 
forces at work, not so considerable that we are 
obliged to feel that the development of early 
Christianity was wholly, or to any great extent, 
the result of an illusion. 

From our secondary, as from our primary, bias 
in favor of the resurrection, we are thus set free. 
We can approach it without any side-long glances 
at the chances of our personal immortality upon 
the one hand, or at the development of early 
Christianity upon the other. 

The return of a man to life who has been ac- 
tually dead for a period of twenty-four hours or 
longer is an occurrence of such exceeding rarity, 
to say the least, that the evidence by which it is 
established ought to be of the most impressive and 
conclusive character. I am aware that solely in 
the interest of the New Testament miracles, and 



198 THE MAN JESUS. 

especially in the interest of Jesus' resurrection, it 
has been discovered that " evidence is evidence," 
and that it requires no more evidence to establish 
a resurrection from the dead than it does to estab- 
lish anything else, even the most ordinary fact ; 
but let any one of those who reason thus hear of 
any unusual event, and instinctively he requires 
more evidence for it than for an ordinary event. 
Thus, if one of them should hear that an omnibus 
had. been seen going up or down Broadway, drawn, 
driven, and freighted in the usual manner, one day 
last week, he w^ould believe this without a mo- 
ment's hesitation ; but if he should hear that a 
locomotive, with a train of cars attached, was seen 
going up or down Broadway, he would require a 
hundred times as much evidence for this statement 
as for the first ; and if he should hear that a train 
of cars had been seen going up or down Broadway 
without any locomotive or any means of propul- 
sion or traction, the amount of evidence he would 
require, before he would accept such a statement 
as the truth, would be infinitely greater than for 
either of the previous statements. Nothing is 
surer than that we do all of us spontaneously, and 
especially those of us who have a judgment at all 
educated, demand more and clearer evidence for 
unusual than for usual events, and in proportion 
to their unusualness; and nothing is surer than 
that we ought to do exactly this, and that men's so 



THE RESURRECTION. 199 

doing is in all ages one of the prime conditions of 
human progress. The more evidence men have 
demanded for extraordinary events, the more terri- 
tory has science conquered from the realm of su- 
perstition and annexed to its own. 

Now let us consider whether the evidence for 
the resurrection of Jesus is as much stronger than 
that which we demand for any ordinary event, as 
this event is more than ordinary ; — whether it is 
as strong as evidence should be for any event 
which is remarkably contradictory of our average 
experience. 

The four gospels are our principal authorities. 
The resurrection of Jesus is related in each one of 
these with more or less detail. Matthew repre- 
sents Mary Magdalene and the other Mary as 
going on Saturday evening * to the sepulchre ; 
Mark represents these and Salome as going early 
Sunday morning, "after 2 the rising of the sun;" 
Luke increases the number of women, and fixes 
the time before sunrise ; John represents Mary 
Magdalene as coming alone, " early, while it was 
yet dark." Here, to begin with, is a certain 
amount of inconsistency ; and, other things being 
equal, that one or more women at some time or 
other went to the sepulchre would be all we could 
infer. According to Matthew, in the presence of 

1 The original Greek has this meaning. 

2 The Greek has this force. 



200 THE MAN JESUS. 

Mary Magdalene and the other Mary, there was a 
great earthquake, caused by an angel who came 
and rolled away the stone of the sepulchre, and 
sat on it; "and for fear of him the keepers did 
shake and became as dead men ; and the angel 
said unto the women, Fear ye not, for I know that 
ye seek Jesus who hath been crucified. He is not 
here, for he was raised, as he said. Come, see the 
place where he lay ; and go quickly and tell his 
disciples that he was raised from the dead ; and be- 
hold he goeth before you into Galilee : there shall 
ye see him." Here you will notice there is no 
claim that any one witnessed the resurrection. 
The guard do not see it, nor the women. The an- 
gel informs them that it has already taken place. 
Again, this account, if true, would preclude the 
appearance of the risen Jesus to any one in Jeru- 
salem. That God should send an angel to hasten 
the disciples to Galilee to meet Jesus there, and 
that afterward they should see him in Jerusa- 
lem, gives God the appearance of a person who 
does not know his own mind, or the angel the ap- 
pearance of not being well-informed. This story 
must have been first current in circles where an 
appearance in Jerusalem was no part of the tradi- 
tion ; but from beginning to end the story is a 
tissue of improbabilities. We have an angel with 
his appearance like lightning and his raiment white 
as snow. Now an angel in a story is as sure a 



THE RESUKRECTION. 201 

proof that the story is a legend, as a trout in the 
■milk that the milk has suffered from adulteration. 
The angel causes an earthquake. A very little 
knowledge of the nature of an earthquake is suf- 
ficient to discredit this one, mentioned only by 
Matthew, among whose "properties" earthquakes 
particularly abound. He introduces one at the 
moment of Jesus' death, in the course of which 
" the graves were opened, and many bodies of the 
saints which slept arose and went into Jerusalem 
and were seen by many ; " but the other gospels do 
not mention any such occurrence, though it is suf- 
ficiently impressive for a passing word. The guard 
at the tomb is another trait peculiar to the First 
Gospel. It was evidently placed there ideally, to 
rebut any charge that the body of Jesus was secretly 
removed by his disciples, not actually to prevent 
such removal. That Pilate would detail a Eoman 
guard for such a purpose is incredible ; that the 
guard, to please the Sanhedrin, would risk their 
lives by confessing that they fell asleep, is unspeak- 
ably absurd. The account in Matthew also suggests 
the question, "What was the need of an earthquake 
to roll away the stone of the sepulchre when Jesus 
was already risen ? for it is so represented. 

Let us now consider the account of the resur- 
rection in the Second Gospel. It is that after sun- 
rise 1 Sunday morning, Mary Magdalene and Mary 
1 Literally, "The sun having just risen." Folsom's translation. 



202 THE MAN JESUS. 

the mother of James, and Salome went with spices 
to embalm the body of Jesus and found the stone 
of the sepulchre rolled away, and entering, saw a 
young man sitting on the right side, in a long, 
white garment, who spoke in terms very similar to 
those of the angel in Matthew. Here are several 
divergencies from the account in Matthew. There, 
an, earth quake, — here, none ; there, the stone rolled 
away after the arrival of the women, — here, before ; 
there, the angel sitting on the stone, — here, in the 
sepulchre ; there, they go and tell the disciples, — 
here, in flagrant disobedience to the angelic com- 
mand, they tell no one ; and with the assertion 
that they told no one the Second Gospel properly 
ends, for the concluding verses (9-20) are not 
found in the early manuscripts. These verses evi- 
dently embody an independent legend, more nearly 
allied to that of the Fourth Gospel than to the 
others. 

The account in Luke is different in several par- 
ticulars from that of Matthew and Mark. It agrees 
with Mark in finding the stone removed. It adds 
Joanna to the two women of Matthew, where 
Mark adds Salome. It adds other women who are 
not specified. In place of the angel on the stone in 
Matthew, and the " young man " in the sepulchre 
in Mark, we have here two men in shining gar- 
ments, who remind the women that Jesus had 
promised to rise again on the third day. "And 



THE RESURRECTION. 203 

they remembered his words." As if they could 
have forgotten them if he had ever spoken such ! 
The women go and tell the eleven all these things. 
" And these words appeared to them an idle tale, 
and they believed them not." Strange, if Jesus 
had indeed, as the Synoptists^tell, again and again 
foretold to them his resurrection ! It is not claimed 
here any more than in Matthew and Mark that 
any one saw the resurrection. Perhaps the most 
important difference is that Galilee is no longer 
specified, as in Matthew and Mark, as the place 
where Jesus will show himself to his disciples. 
The bearing of this difference will be hereafter ap- 
parent. 

So far, in these lectures, I have made no use of 
the Fourth Gospel, for reasons given in my first 
lecture. It is a production of the second century, 
and not like the Synoptics the result of traditional 
agglomeration, but a dogmatic treatise in which 
everything is made to serve the preconceived idea 
that Jesus was the incarnate Logos ; but in its 
treatment of the resurrection, it has the appearance 
of representing a more developed form of the le- 
gend. Mary Magdalene goes to the sepulchre 
alone and finds the stone rolled away. She runs 
and finds Peter and John, and these two run to 
the sepulchre and find it empty. Not knowing 
the Scriptures — that Jesus must rise from the 
dead — they go to their own homes. Strange again 



204 THE MAN JESUS. 

if Jesus had foretold his resurrection so frequently ! 
Here, again, there is no claim that any one saw the 
resurrection. The disciples went to their own 
homes without any idea that such a thing had 
taken place. 

But when they had gone home Mary Magdalene, 
whom they had left weeping at the mouth of the 
tomb, looks in and sees two angels sitting " one at 
the head, the other at the feet, where the body of 
Jesus lay/' though a minute before the disciples 
had seen nothing but the grave-clothes. Suddenly 
turning, she sees Jesus, but taking him for the 
gardener, she asks him if he has taken away her 
master's body, and if so, where it is laid. Jesus 
calls her by name, and then she recognizes him and 
goes and tells the disciples that she has seen him. 
Here again there is no mention of Galilee, nor any 
promise of meeting the disciples anywhere ; rather 
an implication that he will not do so. That vari- 
ous meetings are narrated further on, points to the 
fact that the account in the Fourth Gospel is an 
incongruous jumble of various legends. 

And now let us consider the different statements 
in regard to the appearance of Jesus to different 
persons after his resurrection. One of the most 
interesting of these statements is that relating to 
the walk to Emmaus. This statement is in Luke. 
Two disciples, not of the twelve, were walking to- 
wards Emmaus, a village seven or eight miles from 



THE RESURRECTION. 205 

Jerusalem. They are joined by a person whom 
they do not recognize, who expounds to them 
the Scriptures concerning the death and res- 
urrection of Jesus. Afterward, while eating with 
them, he takes bread, breaks it, and gives thanks. 
Then they recognize Jesus and he vanishes from 
their sight. Beautiful as it is, the legendary char- 
acter of this story should be apparent to the dullest 
sense. No such village as Emmaus can be identi- 
fied within seven or eight miles from Jerusalem. 
A village of similar name in Galilee suggests that 
this account originally belonged to the circle of 
tradition which represented Jesus as first appear- 
ing to his disciples in Galilee. We have here a 
Jesus who is not recognized, although he is corpo- 
real enough to eat food, while he is at the same 
time a phantom who appears and vanishes like an 
Homeric deity. It is said that the disciples, return- 
ing to Jerusalem, found the eleven and were told 
that Jesus " was raised and was seen by Simon." 
Of this appearance there is no other mention, and 
the statement by itself can have no evidential 
value. 

The two from Emmaus are still talking with the 
eleven when Jesus stands in their midst. They 
are affrighted and think they see a spirit, but he 
bids them handle him, telling them " a spirit hath 
not flesh and bones as ye see me having." Then 
he appeases his hunger with broiled fish and 



206 THE MAN JESUS. 

honeycomb. Enjoining on them to remain in Je- 
rusalem, he leads them out towards Bethany, and 
while in the act of blessing them he is taken up 
into heaven. Here again we have a person who 
is by turns a phantom and a substantial person- 
ality. This statement you will see precludes any 
appearance in Galilee, and fixes the ascension on 
the day of the resurrection. 

The account in John is evidently a developed 
form of this in Luke. On the day of the resurrec- 
tion, the disciples are sitting with fastened 1 doors, 
when suddenly Jesus appears among them and pro- 
ceeds to offer evidence of his corporeality. Eight 
days later he appears again to confirm the faith of 
Thomas, who must feel the nail-prints and put his 
hand into his wounded side before he can believe. 
The divergence of this account from that of Luke 
is palpable enough. In Luke the ascension is on 
the day of the resurrection. Here Jesus is corpo- 
really present eight days later, — corporeal and yet 
capable of " appearing " in a room whose doors are 
fastened. 2 Subsequent appearances of Jesus are 
represented in the last chapter of John, but- this 
chapter formed no part of the original Gospel. 
Still it is interesting as showing how the legend 
grew more grossly extravagant as time went on. 

Eeturning to the First Gospel, we find there an 

1 This is certainly the force of " shut for fear of the Jews." 

2 See above. 



THE RESURRECTION. 207 

account of an appearance of Jesus to his disciples 
in Galilee. The undoubted force of this tradition is 
that Jesus had not appeared in Jerusalem, and did 
not afterward. Of the ascension there is no ac- 
count whatever. And now a word in regard to the 
ascension. Matthew does not mention it. Mark is 
equally silent ; but in the appendix to this Gospel 
it is said that "he was taken up into heaven, and 
sat on the right hand of God." John also is silent. 
So, then, we have three Gospels, out of four, making 
no final disposition of the risen Jesus. Had he 
come to life only to die again, and that immediately, 
the death of ordinary men ? Why no mention of 
this ? Did he remain living for some time longer ? 
Had he then become so insignificant that he de- 
served no further mention ? Matthew, Mark, and 
John leave us entirely in the dark concerning all 
these things ; but Luke's is the Gospel of the As- 
cension ; and, as we have seen, he fixes this on the 
day of the resurrection. The author of Luke 
is also the author of Acts. In Acts also, there is 
an account of the ascension ; but there it is said 
that it was not till forty days after the resurrec- 
tion. When a writer contradicts himself in this 
astonishing fashion what reliance can we place on 
anything he says ? And yet Luke wrote his Gos- 
pel, as he tells us, after many had " taken in hand " 
a similar task, and he tells us that it is a record of 
the things that were "most certainly believed" 



208 THE MAN JESUS. 

or " fully established " among the early Christians. 
How " certainly " or " fully " we may judge from 
the fact that ten years later, writing the book 
of Acts, he changes the ascension from the first 
day to the fortieth after the resurrection. Could 
we have any better evidence of the variableness 
of the tradition, or of the absolutely uncritical 
nature of the evangelist's method of research? 
When a writer contradicts himself in this man- 
ner, without a word of apology or explanation, 
what contradictions may we not expect from dif- 
ferent writers, and what a quicksand must be 
the entire New Testament account of both the 
resurrection and ascension ! 

And now having reviewed the testimony of the 
Gospels to the resurrection in almost every partic- 
ular, what is the net result ? Do we find that this 
testimony is as much more complete and satisfac- 
tory than the testimony which we require for any 
ordinary event, as the resurrection is more remark- 
able and unusual than any ordinary event ; for ex- 
ample, the death of Jesus ? This was in the course 
of nature; and all the accounts agree concerning 
the manner of it; but here no single account is 
self-consistent or agrees with any other. The dif- 
ferent accounts are self-destructive and mutually 
destructive all. They agree in hardly a single par- 
ticular. They differ in particulars of the first im- 
portance. Here the appearance of the risen Jesus 



I 

THE RESURRECTION. 209 

is placed in Galilee ; there, in direct contravention 
of his own assertions, in Jerusalem. Here his as- 
cension is definitely placed on the first day ; else- 
where, by different writers, later, but without 
general agreement. Of testimony to the act of 
rising there is absolutely none. Here the risen 
Jesus is a man of flesh and blood ; elsewhere a 
bodiless ghost ; and so on through all the weary 
catalogue of difference and contradiction. 

Let me revert a moment to my original illustra- 
tion. I said that if we heard that a train of cars 
had been seen upon Broadway, moving without 
any motor power, we should require an incalcula- 
ble amount of evidence before we believed the 
statement. If all the witnesses confirmed each 
other* in every particular we should still be in 
doubt. How then if all the witnesses were diver- 
gent and contradictory in their statements ; if some 
said the train was going up Broadway and others 
said it was going down ; some that there were 
many cars, others that there were few; some 
that they were white and some that they were 
black ; some that it was in the evening, others 
that it was in the morning ; — and so on ? This 
is a very homely illustration but it is to the 
point. It does not exaggerate in the least degree 
the conflicting character of the testimony to the 
resurrection of Jesus contained in the four Gos- 
pels. 

14 



210 THE MAN JESUS. 

But it is admitted and even insisted by many- 
critics of a conservative stamp, that the Gospels 
are not our strongest evidence for the resurrection. 
The evidence of Paul, we are assured, is much 
stronger. His authentic epistles were written 
from twenty to thirty years after the death of Je- 
sus ; from fifty to one hundred years before the 
Gospels assumed their present shapes, say the less 
conservative critics ; from twenty-five to fifty years 
say the more conservative ; and not only does 
Paul continually assert and imply the resurrection, 
but he builds upon it a great scheme of doctrine. 
What then is the amount and nature of Paul's 
evidence to the resurrection of Jesus ? " On one 
occasion," says Dr. Sanday, " he gives a very cir- 
cumstantial account of the testimony on which the 
belief in the resurrection rested." Let us proceed 
at once to examine this account. It is the central 
citadel of the argument for the resurrection. If it 
is impregnable to the assault of critical science, 
the failure of the Gospels to establish this in any 
least degree may yet be made good. In First Cor- 
inthians, xv. 3, we read, " For I delivered unto you 
that which I also received, that Christ died for our 
sins according to the Scriptures, and that he was 
raised again on the third day ; and that he was 
seen by Peter, then by the twelve. After that he 
was seen by above five hundred brethren at once, 
of whom the greater part remain unto this present 



THE RESURRECTION. 211 

day, but some are fallen asleep. After that he was 
seen by James, then by all the apostles ; and last 
of all he was seen by me also as by one born out 
of due time." This is what is called " a very cir- 
cumstantial account " of the testimony for the res- 
urrection. Could anything be less circumstantial ? 
Is it not the barest summary possible of what Paul 
considered the evidence for the resurrection ? Not 
a single circumstance is given of any one of the 
alleged appearances of Jesus. Nevertheless the 
attempt has frequently been made to connect these 
different appearances of the risen Jesus with the 
appearances related in the Gospels. There is good 
reason to believe that Paul meant his list to be 
exhaustive of the facts ; but of the appearance of 
Jesus to Mary Magdalene and the other women 
he has not a word. " Why ? Because he had 
not heard of these appearances, or because he did 
not believe in them ? On either supposition the 
omission deducts something from the testimony of 
the Gospels, already a minus quantity. The first 
appearance specified is to Peter. This is supposed 
to correspond to the w^ords in Luke, " and was seen 
of Simon." It is quite possible that it refers to 
the same tradition; but in Luke not a circum- 
stance is given, and the other Gospels mention no 
such appearance. To attach any weight to such a 
statement therefore would be the height of folly. 
The next appearance in Paul's list is to the twelve. 






212 THE MAN JESUS. 

This has been identified with the appearances in 
Luke 1 and John 2 which we have already consid- 
ered. If justly so, it can have no evidential value 
over and above that of those accounts, which we 
have seen to be mutually and self-destructive. The 
next appearance mentioned by Paul — to above 
five hundred brethren at once — is identified with 
the Galilean appearance in Matthew. If rightly, 
the account in Matthew is a damaging commen- 
tary. If the identification is doubtful, then the 
omission of all mention of such a striking and 
glorious manifestation of the risen Jesus from the 
Gospels, points to the weakness of the tradition on 
this head. There is nothing in Paul's words to 
imply that he had ever spoken on the subject with 
one of the five hundred spectators. That any such 
number of disciples could have been gathered any- 
where, within a short time after the death of Jesus, 
it is impossible to believe. The appearance to 
James is not mentioned in any of the four Gospels, 
but in the " Gospel according to the Hebrews " such 
an appearance is recorded in an exceedingly apoc- 
ryphal form. The appearance " to all the apostles " 
cannot be identified with any appearance in the 
Gospels, and only proves the shifty character of 
the tradition twenty years after the death of 
Jesus. 

It is argued that Paul's acquaintance with the 

1 Luke xxiv. 36. 2 John xx. 19. 



THE RESURRECTION. 213 

apostles must have been the basis of his assurance ; 
but his acquaintance with them was inconsidera- 
ble. After his conversion he did not go to them 
but retired into Arabia. After three years he went 
to Jerusalem and stayed fifteen days with Peter, 
— seeing nothing of the other apostles, — and four- 
teen years elapsed before he went to Jerusalem 
again. He boasted that the apostles had added 
nothing to his knowledge of Jesus. Still there can 
be no doubt that the passage we have been consid- 
ering reflects with sufficient accuracy the tradition 
of the Church A. d. 57, nor that the apostles held 
substantially to this tradition ; but as to the nature 
of the different appearances of Jesus, Paul's state- 
ment tells us nothing, and but for its concluding 
clause we should be left wholly in doubt as to his 
own opinion. 

But this concluding clause is exceedingly signif- 
icant : " and last of all he was seen of me also." 
Here again not a single circumstance is vouchsafed 
to us. This is a great misfortune ; for, as Paul 
makes no distinction between his sight of the risen 
Jesus and that of the others, if he had told us the 
circumstances of his experience, we should know, 
at least, what he thought of the others'. That Paul 
thought he had seen the risen Jesus, and that he con- 
sidered his sight of him as good as any other, — 
so much is certain. Now it is common to suppose 
that Paul refers to what is generally spoken of as his 



214 THE MAN JESUS. 

conversion on his way from Jerusalem to Damas- 
cus. Three different accounts of this, more or less 
contradictory, are given in Acts ; but Paul nowhere 
refers in his own writings to this event, — an as- 
tonishing fact if there was any such in his experi- 
ence. He dates his conversion from no such event, 
but from a subjective experience of the truth and 
power of Christ's religion ; but even supposing that 
it was this event which he had in mind when he 
wrote, " and last of all he was seen of me also," 
and again, " Have I not seen Jesus Christ oar 
Lord?" — this sight of Jesus must have been years 
after his death. That it was a sight of the body 
of Jesus which hung upon the cross there is not an 
intimation, nor indeed that he saw Jesus at all. He 
saw an intolerable light and heard, or imagined 
that he heard, the voice of Jesus. If Paul really 
considered this a valid manifestation of the risen 
Jesus, nothing could be more weakening than such 
an opinion on his part to his testimony to the res- 
urrection. It remands all the previous appearances 
to the same province of visionary exaltation. The 
intellectual force of Paul is cited as an evidence that 
he was not a visionary person. What, not when 
he himself tells us that on one occasion he was 
" caught up into the third heaven, — whether in the 
body or out of the body he knew not, — and heard 
unspeakable things ? " But, as I have said, Paul's 
sight of the risen Jesus cannot be identified with 



THE RESURRECTION. 215 

the event on the Damascus road. Of its nature he 
has not vouchsafed to us one word. Whatever it 
was, it was something which occurred years after 
the death of Jesus, and it must have been some- 
thing entirely different from the appearance of Je- 
sus in the same body with which he died, the 
resurrection of which is represented with much 
inconsistency in the four Gospels. 

So much for the testimony of Paul. If, as Dr. 
Sanday says, it is stronger than the testimony of 
the Gospels, the testimony of the Gospels must be 
the weakest of all testimony. It is indeed ; and 
the combined testimony of the Gospels and Paul's 
Epistles is inadequate to establish the historical 
character of any extraordinary event, much more 
one so remarkably extraordinary as the return of a 
man, actually dead, to life, and his ascension into 
heaven " with his flesh and bones." That men 
could believe this centuries ago, when the learning 
of the few was as superstitious as the ignorance of 
the many, I can easily understand. That the igno- 
rant and superstitious of the present time, who 
know nothing of the laws of evidence, who have 
no appreciation of the inviolable sanctity of the 
natural order of the world, and no perception that 
it is men's growing faith in this which marks the 
hours of progress on the great dial of history, — 
that such can still, in this last quarter of the nine- 
teenth century, regard the evidence of the New 



216 THE MAN JESUS. 

Testament as sufficient to support the physical 
resurrection of Jesus is not strange ; but it is pass- 
ing strange that men of intelligence, of culture, of 
learning, and of apparent honesty, can be of this 
opinion. I cannot understand it. The evidence 
for the physical resurrection of Jesus in the New 
Testament is less conclusive than that which a 
criminal judge in one of our city courts might 
properly require to convict a common thief of 
petty larceny. I have said this before, and I re- 
peat it with renewed conviction that it does no 
state the case too strongly. The utter insufficiency 
of the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus can- 
not be overstated. 

But we are told that where there is so much 
smoke there must be some fire ; that where there is 
so much belief that something happened, something 
must have happened, — if not the physical resurrec- 
tion, then something else. Agreed, and still the 
something that occurred may have been a very 
modest something which gradually, through va- 
rious processes of accretion, attained to a consid- 
erable bulk. It is not necessary to suppose that 
the tradition of the New Testament was the result 
of any one event. Different parts of it we can 
trace to different sources. One part is the reflec- 
tion of Old Testament texts; another of actual 
sayings of Jesus, sadly misunderstood ; another of 
unconscious exaggeration ; another of the more or 



! 



THE RESURRECTION. 217 

less conscious endeavor to harmonize incongruous 
elements. Besides all these sources of the tra- 
dition, was there something more ? I am in- 
clined to answer, Yes. What was it ? Many- 
have said it was the resuscitation of Jesus from ap- 
parent death, and they have argued their case with 
a great deal of ingenuity. Even our dear friend, 
Dr. Furness, is inclined to this idea in its most po- 
etic form. Of course such a resuscitation would 
have no theological significance. It would be no 
crowning miracle. It would not be a miracle 
at all. It would neither vindicate the Messi- 
anic idea of Jesus nor our personal immortality. 
Still, if it were a fact it would be worth while 
to know it, painful and barren as it would be. 
But the evidence for such a fact, though it 
would be the immediate inference from any cer- 
tainty that Jesus was seen alive after his burial, is 
wholly insufficient. What is infinitely more likely 
is that there was some visionary experience arising 
from the intensely excited condition of the disci- 
ples' minds after the death of their great teacher. 
Coleridge said he had no doubt that Dr. Johnson 
saw the Cock-Lane ghost; he only doubted whether 
the ghost was there for him to see. I have myself 
little doubt that the disciples saw Jesus on one or 
more occasions after his death. I am very sure 
however, that he was not there for them to see. 
What seemed objective was the projection of an 



218 THE MAN JESUS. 

ideational state. Here was no miracle. The rec- 
ords of morbid psychology abound in such phe- 
nomena ; and not only in connection with a single 
person, but in connection with many persons, alto- 
gether and at once, seeing the same projected image 
of an ideational state. Nothing is so contagious as 
this condition of the mind. Given the initial expe- 
rience, and no one is willing to be left behind. At 
the burning of the Crystal Palace hundreds of per- 
sons watched for an hour or more the agonies of an 
escaped animal upon the roof; but all the time the 
animal which they were pitying was safe and sound, 
and what they saw was a piece of tin-roofing, shriv- 
elled in the flames. Where there is less basis for a 
common vision than there was here, the projection 
of the ideational state is even more contagious. 

Given such an experience on one or more occa- 
sions, and the legend of the resurrection was sure 
to be developed, soon or late, into its present bulk. 
We have reason to believe that the scene of this 
experience was Galilee. Matthew and Mark, you 
will remember, suggest an appearance in Galilee 
exclusive of any at Jerusalem. The indications are 
that the original tradition embodied this Galilean 
appearance ; that all the rest is subsequent accre- 
tion and embellishment. The indications also are 
that the original tradition did not include any stay 
upon the earth, if any physical resurrection. It 
was the glorified Jesus who was seen ; and there- 



THE RESURRECTION. 219 

fore in the original tradition, there was no as- 
cension. The resurrection and ascension were one 
and the same thing. This is Paul's thought as 
well. Though he has so much to say about the 
resurrection, he has not a word concerning any as- 
cension or any period of physical life upon the 
earth after the resurrection. Such is the most 
reasonable account that can be given of the causes 
that were operative in producing the New Testa- 
ment tradition. They are not simple, but exceed- 
ingly complex : an ideational state projecting itself 
from minds morbidly excited ; inferences from cer- 
tain Old Testament texts, and certain words of 
Jesus; unconscious exaggeration; more or less con- 
scious adaptation of part to part, and all to certain 
ends ; — these were the elements which combined 
to make up the tradition of the resurrection which 
has come down to us. 

"Nothing is here for tears; nothing to wail." 
Different as is this result from the average belief 
of Christendom, there is nothing in it directly, or 
by implication, that need cause any rational being a 
moment's trouble or alarm ; for we have seen that 
even if the resurrection could be proved to have 
been a fact, it could not affect the question of our 
personal immortality ; but who shall say how much 
the natural supports of this have been weakened by 
centuries of reliance on a single miraculous occur- 
rence ? I dare believe that when the last vestige 



220 THE MAN JESUS. 

of belief in this occurrence has been stripped away, 
the hope of immortality, committed to the natural 
reason of mankind, will enter on a new career of 
unexampled power and glory. Nor need the su- 
pernaturalist be sad because his miracle of miracles 
has lost all standing-ground. Once certain that 
the resurrection was a fact, and law would straight- 
way adopt it into its ever widening sphere. The 
fact would only prove that under certain condi- 
tions, seldom realized, the phenomenon of death is 
not absolutely final. The supernatural would be 
as far as ever from being demonstrated. The 
would-be supernaturalist may demur at this, but 
the wise man will rejoice ; for the wise man wel- 
comes every fresh evidence of the sublime cohe- 
rency, the invariable order of phenomena. The 
more coherency, the more invariableness, the more 
absolute our confidence in the Infinite and Eternal 
One. 

There was another burial of Jesus than that in 
the fresh rock-hewn sepulchre of the New Testa- 
ment tradition. It was in a tomb where thousands 
were already buried, buried alive under the forms 
and ceremonies of an effete religion. Into this 
tomb the friends of Jesus, the apostles and the 
brothers who, in his lifetime, had given him no 
countenance, made haste to carry him; not his 
emaciated form, not his nail-wounded flesh, but 
the real man, — his thought, his spirit. But from 



THE RESURRECTION. 221 

this burial of Jesus there was indeed a resurrec- 
tion ; and the angel who rolled away the stone of 
the sepulchre was no supernatural being, with his 
countenance like lightning, and his raiment white 
as snow ; no, but a man who, according to his own 
description, was " in bodily presence weak, and in 
speech contemptible." Nevertheless there was 
that in him which was sufficient for the burden 
that was laid upon him. With mighty, ringing 
strokes he hewed his way through manifold ob- 
structions, straight to the spirit of Jesus, — his in- 
most thought and life, — and bade it rise up and 
come forth ; and even so it did, and Christianity, 
that might else have been only a Jewish sect, los- 
ing itself in arid wastes of pedantry and ritual 
after a few generations, entered upon a career of 
universal influence. This was the real resurrec- 
tion of Jesus, the triumph of his essential spirit 
over the Judaizing narrowness of the Church of 
the Apostles, and it was a resurrection of infinitely 
greater significance than any impossible resuscita- 
tion of his mortal body ; and Paul of Tarsus, the 
man through whom it was accomplished, was of 
such mind and heart and will, that, in comparison 
with him, all bent with toil and scarred with battle 
though he was, the dazzling brightness of any le- 
gendary angel is "no light, but rather darkness 
visible" 



VIL 

THE DEIFICATION. 



"More than anything else, it was just then important 
that the power to organize society and create the institu- 
tions of the future should be a moral power ; and that was 
the same as saying that it should rest on a religious con- 
viction, held with unreasoning fervor, denned in a symbol 
positive enough to enlist, like a flag, the passionate loyalty 
of multitudes of men. A decaying civilization, a perishing 
social fabric, a political framework battered and just yield- 
ing before a frightful tempest of invasion, a decrepit pagan- 
ism, guilty of vices that might not be named and cruelties 
not to be recalled without horror, — these were on one side ; 
and on the other, the sublime faith, held with whatever of 
unreason, turbulence, or feud, that Almighty God had once 
lived bodily among men, and that He did really, in person, 
lead them now in the fight against His enemies." 

Joseph Henry Allen. 



VII. 

THE DEIFICATION. 

THE phrase, " an epoch-making book/' is a cap- 
ital one where it is well deserved, but it is 
frequently applied to books, damp from the press, 
which are a nine-days' wonder, and then go down 
into well merited oblivion ; but the Cur Dens Homo 
of Anselm, the great scholar-bishop of the eleventh 
century, was indeed an epoch-making book. It 
revolutionized the doctrine of the atonement. For 
centuries before Anselm, the death of Jesus had 
been regarded as a price paid to the devil for the 
liberation of souls legally his, and doomed to ever- 
lasting suffering on account of Adam's sin; but 
since the time of Anselm the death of Jesus has 
been regarded as a price paid to the Almighty, en- 
abling him to remit the natural penalty of Ad- 
am's sin without any subordination of the claims 
of justice to the pleadings of mercy, the sufferings 
of Jesus being regarded as an equivalent for the 
remitted sufferings of all who might be saved. 
Cut Deus Homo means " why God was made man." 

15 



226 THE MAN JESUS. 

It is not exactly the opposite of this problem that 
we are to consider this morning : Why the man 
Jesus was made God ? It is, Sow he was made 
God ; the process through which the conception of 
him in men's minds passed, so that, from being at 
first regarded simply and entirely as a man, his 
deity was at length asserted in terms as clear as 
the nature of language would permit. 1 

You will discover, as I proceed, that it is not 
my object in this discourse to claim the testimony 
of the New Testament throughout in favor of a 
purely humanitarian conception of Jesus. There 
is no reason why I should be anxious to do this, 
for if the teaching of the New Testament were as 
expressive of the deity of Jesus as the Nicene 
creed, or the still more dogmatic Athanasian, it 
would not be conclusive of the fact. Our present 
knowledge of the New Testament is such that it 
precludes all use of it as an authority over and 
above the measure of its intrinsic rationality. To 
proceed on any other principle than this is a spe- 
cies of intellectual immorality for any person who 
is decently informed concerning the New Testa- 
ment. Whatever then the teachings of the New 
Testament prove to be concerning the nature of 
Jesus, the facts remain the same. The teachings 

1 The Paulus of F. C. Baur, his First Three Christian Cen- 
turies, and Pfleiderer's Paulinism are the most valuable studies 
that I know of this development. 



THE DEIFICATION. 227 

of the New Testament are not conclusive of any 
speculative truth. The rational religionist can ap- 
proach them without any bias. If the deity of 
Jesus were taught with unmistakable clearness 
upon every page, he would be in no wise bound to 
accept it. It would still remain for him to con- 
sider the intrinsic rationality of this doctrine, with 
no more prejudgment than if he had found it in the 
Mohammedan Koran or the Buddhist Dhamma- 
pada. 

What we do actually find in the New Testament 
is not a perfectly homogeneous exposition of the 
doctrine of the nature of Jesus, but an exposition 01 
incidental statement that exhibits much variety ; 
which variety betrays the character of a develop- 
ment of which the starting-point is found in the 
Synoptic Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and 
the culmination in the Fourth Gospel. This deveb 
opment does not then exactly synchronize with tlu 
order of time in which the New Testament writing* 
appeared. The earliest writings of the New Test- 
ament are the genuine Epistles of Paul, extending 
from about A. D. 53 to A. D. 63. These Epistle? 
represent a more developed form of the doctrine o 
Christ's nature than do the Synoptic Gospels ; but 
this is only what we should expect from what w« 
know of Paul and his relation to the early church 
and from the character of his letters in comparison 
with that of the Synoptic Gospels. These Gospek 



228 THE MAN JESUS. 

reached their present form much later than the 
Pauline Epistles, but they represent much more 
perfectly the primitive ideas of the early Christians; 
for it is not as if they were made at one cast, like 
the Pauline Epistles. They are, as they now stand, 
the last result of a long process of traditional ag- 
gregation. The comparative unconsciousness of 
their Christology, the absence from them of all 
daring speculation, indeed of anything that can be 
called speculation, is convincing that we are here 
much nearer the fountain-head of Christological 
development than in the letters of St. Paul ; but 
not even in the Synoptic Gospels have we a per- 
fectly consistent representation of the nature of 
Jesus. In general, the conception of Mark and 
Luke is more exalted than that of Matthew, al- 
though it is in Matthew that the conception for a 
moment reaches its highest level, in the words as- 
cribed to Jesus, " All power is given unto me in 
heaven and on earth." Even this, which is un- 
doubtedly the reflection of the afterglow of pious 
adulation on the historic character of Jesus, is still 
within the bounds of a purely humanitarian con- 
ception. The idea is of a dignity and office to be 
bestowed on Jesus by God as a reward of his faith- 
fulness unto death, and through the medium of his 
resurrection. The dignity and office do not inhere 
in his essential nature. Nevertheless, this is the 
highest point reached by the Synoptists. Nowhere 



THE DEIFICATION. 229 

in their representation is there anything which is 
not fundamentally consistent with the pure hu- 
manity of Jesus. When we consider that the Sy- 
noptic Gospels did not reach their present form until 
from sixty to eighty years after the death of Jesus, 
and that in the mean time the Epistles of Paul had 
all been written, and the Epistle to the Hebrews, 
it is astonishing how little they are colored by the 
tendencies of these important writings. It only 
proves with what tenacity the human idea of Jesus 
held its ground, and how slowly the bolder thought 
of Paul fought its way to general recognition. The 
Synoptic Gospels are the Gospels of the early 
church, of the church of the apostles, of the Jew- 
ish Christians. They embody their beliefs. And it 
does not admit of any doubt that the early church, 
the church of the first century, the Jewish Christian 
church, was strictly humanitarian in its conception 
of Jesus ; for its central dogma was that Jesus was 
the Jewish Messiah. Now the Jewish Messiah 
was never conceived as being anything but a man. 
The suggestion that he was God, or a being in any 
such proximity to God as Arianism represented 
him, would have seemed to any pious Jew utterly 
blasphemous. With every successive step in the 
exaltation of Jesus, Judaism became alienated from 
Christianity more and more ; and w T ith his arrival 
at divine honors ceased the last hope of an extended 
Jewish Christianity, and the long centuries of con- 



230 THE MAN JESUS. 

flict and of Christian persecution of the Jews began. 
The Jew-Christians never succumbed to the deified 
Jesus. They resisted every movement of thought 
that tended thither. 

The Jesus of the Synoptists is a human being. 
He works miracles, but the power of working mir- 
acles was not supposed to be inconsistent with the 
nature of a human being. It is ascribed to the 
disciples of Jesus ; to various Old Testament per- 
sonages ; even to the enemies of Jesus by Jesus him- 
self : " If I by Beelzebub cast out devils, by whom 
do your children cast them out ? " " The Son of 
Man," is the favorite Synoptic designation. " The 
Son of God," is used infrequently ; 1 and as used is 
everywhere the title of an office with which Jesus is 
invested, not the designation of a peculiar nature. 
It has no reference whatever to the idea*of miracu- 
lous birth. Possibly, however, it suggested this 
idea. Evidently the doctrine of miraculous birth 
formed no part of the earliest conception of Jesus' 
nature or origin ; for side by side with the stories 
of his miraculous birth in Matthew and Luke, we 
have genealogies tracing the line of his descent 
from David through Joseph, and these genealogies 
must have been written before the stories of mirac- 
ulous birth became current. After this the line 
of Davidic descent was traced through Mary. 
These stories form no part of " the triple tradition " 

1 Never by Jesus himself. 



THE DEIFICATION. 231 

which underlies the Synoptic Gqspels. This begins 
with the baptism of Jesus by John. So does our 
Second Gospel. The Gospel according to the He- 
brews, the Jewish-Christian Gospel of the Ebionites 
and Nazarenes until these Jewish-Christian sects 
became extinct, has no miraculous birth, no legends 
of the infancy, and begins with the simple state- 
ment : " There was a certain man named Jesus, 
about thirty years old, who chose us out;" and 
yet some of the greatest scholars of the early 
church regarded this Gospel as of equal authority 
with our Synoptics. Doubtless it represents the 
starting-point of Christian legend and doctrine 
concerning Jesus : " There was a certain man 
named Jesus, about thirty years old, who chose 
us out." Here, from the descent of the spirit at 
the baptism of Jesus, as in the Synoptics, dates 
the Messianic dignity of Jesus. Not only was he 
purely human, but he was not invested with the 
attributes of his official station till he had come 
well nigh to middle age. The stories of his mir- 
aculous birth are an attempt to carry back his 
dignity a step further. These make his Messiah- 
ship congenital; but they do nothing more. In 
the Synoptics there is not a hint of those doctrines 
of pre-existence which play so conspicuous a part 
in Paul, in the Epistle to the Hebrews, and in the 
Fourth Gospel. The miraculous birth of Jesus did 
not detract from his humanity in the eyes of the 



232 THE MAN JESUS. 

mythologists who fashioned the legend of such a 
birth. Miraculous birth was attributed to Isaac 
and to Samuel, but their entire humanity was 
never for a moment doubted. The germ of the 
doctrine of Christ's sinless nature appears in the 
language ascribed to John the Baptist : " I have 
need to be baptized of thee, and comest thou to 
me ? " for the baptism of John implied the con- 
sciousness of sinfulness. In the Gospel according 
to the Hebrews, Jesus is made to say, " What 
sin have I committed that I should go and be bap- 
tized of him ? " and then adds, " Unless my saying 
this very thing is sinful." An exquisite moral 
perception went to the framing of this story. Its 
maker saw that for Jesus to consider himself sinless, 
would be a sign of moral imperfection. No wonder 
that the tendency to exalt the person of Jesus 
more and more allowed the Gospel which contained 
this penetrating remark to lapse into obscurity, 
although it had, as had no other, the look of an 
authentic apostolic document. To sum up: the 
Jesus of the Synoptic Gospels is a man. No attri- 
butes ascribed to him, no circumstances of his ca- 
reer, make this statement in any degree doubtful. 
How then ? Do not the Synoptists furnish a sin- 
gle item of the process we are met here to consider : 
How Jesus was made God ? They furnish certain 
preluding notes. The glorious attributes with 
which Jesus was invested after death, according to 



THE DEIFICATION. 233 

Matthew, are prophetic of the subsequent disposi- 
tion to find these attributes inhering in his nature. 
The attempt, by means of the miraculous birth, to 
make his Messianic dignity congenital, is prophetic 
of the later disposition to carry it back into the 
aeons of a pre-existent state. 

In the Epistles of Paul the glorification of Jesus 
is much further advanced, and, though it stops far 
short of actual deification, it abounds in phrases 
that might easily bear such an interpretation, and 
paved the way for it whenever one should come 
daring enough to trust himself to such a way, as 
unsubstantial as the floating bridge which turned 
to flame under the flying feet of Galahad, when to 
his blamelessness was granted the first, last, only 
vision of the Holy Grail. If with Ferdinand 
Christian Baur we accept as authentic only four of 
Paul's Epistles out of the fourteen ascribed to him 
in the New Testament, namely, Romans, the two 
Corinthians, and Galatians, Paul's theory of Christ's 
nature is quite homogeneous. If we also accept, as I 
am inclined to do, with the support of many able 
critics, First Thessalonians, Colossians, and Philip- 
pians, then we have in Paul also a development of 
which the starting point is found in First Thessalo- 
nians, his earliest epistle, the middle point in Eo- 
mans, Galatians, and Corinthians, and the culmina- 
tion in Colossians and Philippians. In Thessaloni- 
ans the conception is hardly different from that of 



234 THE MA.N JESUS. 

the Synoptic Gospels. In Komans, Corinthians, and 
Galatians it has already made a great advance. To 
the actual historical Jesus, Paul was quite indiffer- 
ent. He does not quote his words. He does not re- 
count his deeds. He does not dwell on his example. 
His self-denial is not that of a man among men. It 
is the laying aside of heavenly glory, and the as- 
sumption of a human form. Paul's thought centred 
not in the historic Jesus but in an ideal Christ of 
his own conception. This ideal Christ was a man. 
Paul never calls him God, and would, no doubt,- 
have resented the imputation of any tendency to 
deify him. But though the Christ of Paul is a man, 
he is a very different man from the man of the Sy- 
noptics. Notice some of his expressions : "There is 
one God," he says, "and one mediator between God 
and man, the man Christ Jesus." " Since by man 
came death, by man came also the resurrection 
from the dead." "The first man is of the earth 
earthy; the second man is from heaven." Our 
common version reads, "the Lord from heaven," 
but "the Lord" is an interpolation of the later 
manuscripts. This last expression is the key to 
Paul's Christology. Christ is a man, but he is " the 
man from heaven." He is a heavenly man, a pre- 
existent being. If here and there Paul speaks of 
the glorified nature of Jesus as the result of his 
death and resurrection, this is only because his 
thought has not become entirely homogeneous. 



THE DEIFICATION. 235 

Paul was not a consistent thinker, and if we try to 
make all that he said hold fast together we shall 
only weary ourselves without result. This was his 
first thought, — that Jesus was glorified by his 
death and resurrection ; but this could not satisfy 
his speculative genius. A glory with which Christ 
was invested did not satisfy him. He wanted a 
glory for him that was essential to his personality ; 
and so his death and resurrection became only the 
means of his resuming a glory which he had ages 
before his earthly manifestation — the glory of a 
heavenly, archetypal man. Henceforth to Paul the 
human life of Jesus was the merest episode in the 
career of the heavenly man, the ideal Christ of his 
speculative imagination; and yet, lofty as was 
Paul's conception of the Christ, he cherished the 
idea that all men who would might be even such 
as he. Although an image of the divine glory, he 
was not less an image of the possible glory of the 
saints. It was not the character of the historical 
Jesus that marked Paul's limit of possible human 
attainment. It was the nature of the heavenly 
pre-existent Christ. Here is a sufficient proof that 
however Paul might exalt the attributes of Christ 
he- never thought of him as God. 

That he did exalt his attributes in the most dar- 
ing fashion, his Epistles amply prove, even if we 
stop short of Philippians and Colossians. Already 
in Corinthians he is the instrument of the univer- 



236 THE MAN JESUS. 

sal energy of God ; but in Colossians he is not so 
much the instrument of God as a creative, cosmic 
principle. All things are made not only by him, but 
for him. He is the end of all creation. This is a 
decided change from Paul's idea that, at the last, 
Christ will give back into God's hands the domin- 
ion which has been delegated to him, "that God 
may be all in all ; " but I do not think that it is a 
greater change than a mind so freely speculative 
as Paul's might easily make. Even the Christ 
of this conception is not God. He is " the image 
of the invisible God," "the first-born of every 
creature." "In him dwelleth all the fullness of 
the Godhead bodily." "Who, being in the form 
of God, did not covet equality with God." As 
yet no deification, but deification is not far off. 
Whether Colossians and Philippians are Paul's or 
not, they represent the natural development of his 
ideas as they appear in Romans and Corinthians. 

In Hebrews, which is certainly not Paul's, and 
Ephesians, which is somewhat less certainly not his, 
the doctrine of Christ's nature does not differ much 
from that in Colossians and Philippians. Ephe- 
sians is an echo of Colossians. The Epistle to the 
Hebrews has much more original force ; but while 
the Christ of this epistle is exalted to the highest 
cosmical rank, that of the creative principle in 
virtue of which all things have their being, the 
writer endeavors to reconcile this awful majesty 



THE DEIFICATION. 237 

with the earthly career of Jesus in a manner to 
which Paul never condescended. Paul's sinless 
Christ is the pre-existent heavenly and the risen 
glorified Christ. It is necessary to his psychology 
to suppose that the historical Jesus was not free 
from sin ; but the Christ of Hebrews " was tempted 
in all points even as we are, yet without sin." This 
by the way. Neither Hebrews nor Ephesians con- 
ducts us much, if any, further than Colossians in 
our inquiry, How Jesus was made God. The sub- 
ordination of Christ to God is even more emphatic 
'than in Colossians. 

The Apocalypse, which was written (a. d. 69), a 
little later than Hebrews, is somewhat aside from 
the main line of development. The most exalted 
epithets are applied to Jesus ; the most exalted at- 
tributes are assigned to him ; but what would be 
metaphysical in Paul is here rhetorical. The attri- 
butes do not inhere in the personality of the Mes- 
siah. They are badges of distinction. If, however, 
anything could be proved by quoting isolated 
texts, the Apocalypse would be an armory from 
which believers in the deity of Christ could draw 
out many a battle-axe and spear. 

" A little deeper," said the wounded soldier to the 
surgeon probing his wound, close to his heart, — 
"a little deeper, and you will find the emperor." A 
little deeper, and we shall come to the imperial 
doctrine of the New Testament concerning the per- 



238 THE MAN JESUS. 

sonality of Christ, — its loftiest expression, consid- 
erably advanced beyond that of Paul, even though 
Colossians be his work. It is of the Fourth Gospel 
that I now speak ; yet even here the advance is 
more in point of definiteness than in point of exal- 
tation. Various lines of evidence lead up to the 
conclusion that the Fourth Gospel made its appear- 
ance in the second quarter of the second century. 
Before this time the conceptions of Christ's nature 
had sought no alliance with the Alexandrian doc- 
trine of the Logos ; but now the signs of this alli- 
ance began to multiply on every side, and such is • 
their character that we are forbidden to imagine 
that the Fourth Gospel took the lead and set the 
fashion in this line of thought. On the contrary, 
it is absolutely certain that if, at any time during 
the second and third quarters of the second century, 
the Fourth Gospel had been generally recognized 
as a genuine apostolic writing, it must have had 
more influence than we know it had in shaping the 
Logos doctrine of the time. Thus Justin Martyr, 
writing in the middle of the second century, and 
wholly devoted to the doctrine of the Logos-Christ, 
develops the doctrine in a manner widely different 
from that of John, to which his apparent references 
are so slight and so exceedingly doubtful that 
many of the wisest critics are inclined to think 
them only apparent, implying a common stock of 
phrases of which both Justin and the pseudo-John 



THE DEIFICATION. 239 

availed themselves. Even after the middle of the 
century the doctrine of the Logos-Christ is devel- 
oped in a manner quite independent of the Fourth 
Gospel. The inevitable conclusion is that the 
Fourth Gospel was one of many and various at- 
tempts to state the doctrine of Christ's nature in 
terms of the Alexandrian philosophy, which, as the 
most consistent, the most brilliant, the most imag- 
inative, gradually threw every other attempt into 
the shade. The Gospel having thus achieved a 
splendid victory on its own merits, its thinly dis- 
guised claim to be the apostle John's was easily 
allowed. The more prestige for the doctrine it 
contained, the better. 

Paul had developed his doctrine of Christ's na- 
ture without consciously allying it with the Logos 
doctrine of the Alexandrians, which indeed was 
not so generally diffused in his time as it was a 
century later ; but he had developed his doctrine 
to such a height that the wonder is it did not 
sooner coalesce with the Logos doctrine. 

The idea of the Logos or Word came into Jewish 
thought from two sides, from Persia and from 
Greece ; from Persia by way of Babylon, from 
Greece by way of Alexandria. The Persian-Zoro- 
astrian religion taught that God created all things 
by his word. The cosmology in Genesis is of Per- 
sian origin. " God said let there be light, and there 
was light." His word is the creative power. Be- 



240 THE MAN JESUS. 

fore the time of Jesus this Word of God had be- 
come personified in Jewish thought, most fre- 
quently under the name of Wisdom. "Wisdom 
hath been created before all things," we read in 
the Book of Proverbs ; " Wisdom has been created 
before all things," in Ecclesiasticus ; and in the 
Wisdom of Solomon, " She is a reflection of the 
everlasting light, the unspotted mirror of the 
power of God, and the image of his goodness." 
The Greek influence coutributed to the same ten- 
dency of thought. The later followers of Plato, 
the Neo-Platonists, had personified his doctrine of 
the divine idea or reason. They called it the first 
born Son of God, born before the creation of the 
world, itself the agent of creation. It was the im- 
age of God's perfection, the mediator between God 
and man. Philo Judseus, who was born about 
twenty years before Jesus, was possessed with these 
ideas and endeavdred to connect them with the Old 
Testament teachings. He quoted, " Let us make 
man in our own image," to prove that God had an 
assistant in the work of creation, an assistant 
who did all the work, thus saving God from any 
contact with matter, a necessity of the Persian 
system, imported into Jewish thought. He calls 
the Logos the " first born Son of God," " Second 
God," and even " God," but this always in a quali- 
tative, never in a quantitative sense. 

On the one hand, then, the writer of the Fourth 






THE DEIFICATION". 241 

Gospel found this doctrine of the Logos ; and on 
the other hand he found a conception of Jesus ex- 
pressed in terms the most exalted, and bearing a 
very strong resemblance to the terms of the Logos 
doctrine of Philo. True, Philo had never dreamed of 
a human incarnation of the Logos, and Paul had 
never identified his exalted Christ with the Alex- 
andrian Word. The first to do this was pretty cer- 
tainly not the writer of the Fourth Gospel. It 
occurred to many writers at about the same time. 
To affect an alliance between Christianity and 
Alexandrian Platonism was the one passionate en- 
thusiasm midway of the second century. Of this 
enthusiasm the Fourth Gospel is the grandest mon- 
ument. The opening verses of this Gospel might 
have been written by Philo Judaeus : " In the be- 
ginning was the Word, and the Word was with 
God, and the Word was God. The same was in the 
beginning with God. All things were made by 
Him ; and without Him was not anything made 
that was made. In Him was life, and the life was 
the light of men." So far it is Philo speaking in 
the voice of the evangelist. But Philo never could 
have written, "And the Word was made flesh and 
dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory, the glory 
of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace 
and truth." To Philo this incarnation of the Logos 
in a human personality would have seemed a blas- 
phemous proceeding ; and even in John the union 
16 



242 THE MAN JESUS. 

of the Logos with the human personality of Jesus 
is purely verbal. The Logos is " a consuming fire," 
and shrivels up the human personality. In the 
Fourth Gospel representation there is little that is 
really human, and what is so is the survival of 
traditions which the writer was obliged to respect, 
not his own thought. In his own thought the life 
of Jesus was merely a manifestation of the glory of 
the Word of God. It is this Word that speaks, 
and not the human Jesus. " He that hath seen 
me hath seen the Father." " I and my Father are 
one." With such texts as these confronting it, it 
is marvellous that a humanitarian Christ doctrine- 
has ever dared appeal to the New Testament in 
justification of its creed. Humanitarian this is not, 
but it is still unitarian ; unitarian in the most ex- 
alted sense, but still unitarian. Without deifying 
Jesus it could not exalt him further, but it does 
not deify him. The resemblance is so close to the 
Alexandrian Philonism that we must allow this 
the right of an interpreter ; and we know that this 
was extremely careful to insist that the Logos is 
not God. How could it be, when the prime object 
of the idea was to introduce something, some one, 
not God, between God and the material universe ? 
To assert the coextensiveness of the Logos with God 
would have been simply the suicide of the idea. 
In the Fourth Gospel the doctrine is the same. 
" The Word was God," it says ; but the meaning 



THE DEIFICATION. 243 

here is qualitative, not quantitative. For all the 
likeness there is difference, and there is subordi- 
nation: "As the Father hath life in himself, so 
hath he given the Son to have life in himself/' 
These words express the idea of the independent 
personality and subordination of the Logos. Thus 
the New Testament Christ, on the topmost height 
of his development, though infinitely more than 
man, is still not God. The Humanitarians certainly 
cannot claim him ; but no more can the Trinita- 
rians. I say this in no spirit of triumph, for I am 
myself triumphed over as much as the Trinitarians. 
Do I then abandon my humanitarian conception of 
Jesus ? By no means. The New Testament dic- 
tum settles nothing. Any thoughtful person, un- 
derstanding the method of its development, ought 
to see that it settles nothing. Tf the dictum of the 
Fourth Gospel were final, nothing would remain 
for us but to consider Jesus, or rather the Christ, 
as a super-angelic being, coexistent with God, and 
the Creator of the world, and still not God. This 
is old-fashioned Unitarianism of the most exalted 
type, the creed of Arius ; but why should we accept 
the dictum of the Fourth Gospel as final, when we 
know 1 that is a pseudonymous Gospel, written by 
some man of daring speculative genius in the sec- 

1 There are competent critics who would not allow this ; but 
no competent critic will pretend that we are certain of the Jo- 
hannean authorship. 



244 THE MAN JESUS. 

ond quarter of the second century ? The dictum of 
such a Gospel can have no authority for us over 
and above the amount of its intrinsic rationality. 

It would be a wearisome matter to attempt to 
follow the development of thought, concerning the 
nature of Christ, for the century and a half between 
the appearance of the Fourth Gospel, and the great 
Arian 'controversy at the beginning of the fourth 
century. It is a popular fancy that a standard of 
orthodoxy was furnished in the New Testament 
writings in the first century, and that all subsequent 
divergence from this standard was of the nature of 
heresy. Alas, the history of the first Christian 
centuries leads us to no such conclusion ! What 
we find is that the four Gospels attained to general 
recognition as the Gospels only at the close of the 
second century; that this recognition was only 
general, not universal ; that the canon of the New 
Testament fluctuated through a wide range for 
some two or three centuries longer. In the mean- 
time the doctrine of Christ's nature was continually 
in dispute; not strangely either, for within the 
limits of the most honored books of the New Test- 
ament the conception of Christ's nature fluctuated 
between two widely separated points, at one of 
which the conception was purely human, and at 
the other on the verge of deity. 

The nature of Christ was a matter of free specu- 
lation for a period of at least two hundred and fifty 



THE DEIFICATION. 245 

years. In the course of this time every possible 
shade of opinion was entertained. The Jewish 
Christians, who were becoming relatively less sig- 
nificant all the time, held to the more humanitarian 
view. In the Greek and Eoman world the ten- 
dency was to ever greater exaltation. This ten- 
dency was facilitated by the worship of the Eoman 
emperor. This worship had accustomed the ma- 
jority to think of a man as God. This worship, 
satisfying so long as the Flavians and Antonines 
held up the honor of the state, naturally sought 
another and worthier object wh'en the emperors be- 
came too manifestly ungodlike in their life and rule. 
The deification of the emperor has generally been 
regarded as the lowest depth of paganism. On the 
contrary, it corresponded with the most beneficent 
sway of the empire and the highest personal charac- 
ter of the emperors, men who endeavored to deserve 
the appalling honors that were heaped upon them ; 
and it would be difficult to overestimate the con- 
tribution of the imperial worship, — the worship of 
the emperor as God, — to the deification of Jesus. 

A few quotations, taken almost at random, will 
show how various the opinions were concerning the 
nature of Christ for some centuries. Justin Martyr, 
midway of the second century, while himself iden- 
tifying Christ with the Logos and with the God 
who appeared to Abraham, freely allowed that 
there were Christians, whose right to their opinion 



246 THE MAN JESUS. 

he did not dispute, who believed that Jesus was 
" a man of men." What weighty thinking went to 
the solving of these difficult problems can be in- 
ferred from the statement of Theophilus of Antioch, 
one of the most distinguished writers of the second 
century, who, guarding against the notion that the 
Logos was another God, declared that God made 
man and woman both together, lest it should be 
supposed that one God made man ; another, woman ! 
Much of the thinking done was of about this qual- 
ity. In the Clementine Homilies (second-century 
writings) Paul is accused of sheer polytheism in 
making Christ another God. These Homilies as- 
sert the pure humanity of Jesus. Irenaeus, on the 
other hand, insists that those who call Christ mere 
man are in a state of death. Gnostic Christianity 
taught that Christ was the Son of the Supreme 
God; Jesus, the Son of the Creator, who was not the 
Supreme God. These two beings of different ori- 
gin were united in Jesus Christ. Be patient with 
this nonsense. It is necessary to consider it if you 
would know what sort of thinking it was that de- 
veloped the doctrine of Christ's nature. Then there 
were the Docetse, who contended that Jesus had 
no real flesh and blood but was a phantasm. This 
notion is combated in the New Testament: "Every 
spirit that confesseth not that Christ has come in 
the flesh, is not of God." This notion was exceed- 
ingly common and held its own for a long time. 



THE DEIFICATION. 247 

It pleased not Tertullian. To him the danger of 
denying the humanity of Christ seemed greater 
than that of denying his divinity. " Common peo- 
ple/' he said, " think of Christ as a man. Count 
him a man if you please ; " and yet Tertullian was 
the first to introduce the idea and the name Trin- 
ity into Christian theology. This about A. D. 200, 
when it made no impression, and was not followed 
up by Tertullian himself or any other writer. Mid- 
way of the third century Sabellius advocated the 
doctrine that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit were all 
emanations of the Logos, which he identified w T ith 
the Supreme God. Christ, he said, was only a tran- 
sient manifestation of the Logos. For a time this 
quaternity, this four-fold mystery of the divine na- 
ture, threatened to be the orthodox doctrine of the 
church ; but, at a later stage of the controversy, his 
doctrines were pronounced heretical, as also were 
those of Paul of Samosata, who argued that " Christ 
was not God by nature but became so by progressive 
development." Origen, who died A. D. 254, insisted 
on the distinctness of Christ from God, and his 
subordination to him, but announced the doctrine 
of his eternal generation. This was the doctrine 
that was to be stamped as orthodox in the great 
council of ISTicsea, nearly three quarters of a century 
after the death of Origen. 

Consider the immediate course of events which 
led up to this decision. No country so much as 



248 THE MAN JESUS. 

Egypt, no city so much as Alexandria, influenced 
the development of Christianity for four hundred 
years. In the year 318 an Alexandrian bishop, 
Alexander by name, publicly charged Arius, one of 
his presbyters, with holding erroneous doctrines of 
Christ's nature. Arius retorted the charge. The 
controversy widened until it included Egypt, Libya, 
and Palestine under its baleful shadow. Arius was 
excommunicated by a synod of Egyptian and 
Libyan bishops ; but with his excommunication 
the number of his adherents increased rather than 
diminished. He was a man of great intellectual 
force. He believed what he believed. He was an 
ardent propagandist. He set his doctrines to the 
music of the theatres and chanted them in a loud, 
passionate voice. Before long, hundreds were chant- 
ing them, — priests, boatmen, bakers, people of all 
sorts. Said Gregory of Nyssa : " Every corner and 
nook of the city is full of men who discuss in- 
comprehensible subjects ; the streets, the markets, 
the people who sell old clothes, the money-chan- 
gers, the dealers in provisions. Ask a man how 
many oboli it comes to, — he gives you a dogmatic 
discourse on generated and ungenerated being. 
Inquire the price of bread, — you are answered, 
( The Father is greater than the Son, and the Son 
is subordinate to the Father/ Ask if your bath is 
ready, — you are answered, ' The Son of God was 
created out of nothing.' " 



THE DEIFICATION. ■ 249 

The animating motive of Arius was apparently 
to steer the ship of dogma clear of the rock of 
Ditheism, the notion of two Gods. Two beings, one 
unbegotten, the other eternally begotten, seemed to 
him no better than two Gods. As for himself, he 
would not say that " there was a time when Christ 
was not," but "there was when Christ was not." 
He was before time; but God was before him. 
How clear this is ; how palpable ; how wholesome ; 
how nutritious ! Then, too, Arius stuck at the 
word " begotten." If Christ was begotten, then, as 
begotten from the unbegotten, he must inherit the 
unbegottenness of his begetter ! He was not be- 
gotten, then, said Arius ; he was not of one sub- 
stance with the Father; he was created out of 
nothing. There is not wanting evidence that the 
opposite party was animated by the same motive as 
Arius. Its aim was not so much to exalt the per- 
son of Jesus as to avoid Ditheism, and the best way 
to avoid this seemed to insist on the oneness of 
Christ with God. He was too great to be another. 
A being created before time, and himself the crea- 
tor of all things but himself, was sure to be another 
God sooner or later. In vain did Arius insist that 
his " createdness " and his " moment when he was 
not," nullified the danger. The Athanasians could 
not see it so. Thus dreading one and the same evil, 
the two parties took different methods of avoiding 
it, and in their hot insistence, each on its own way, 



250 THE MAN JESUS. 

made every corner of the Eoman Empire ring with 
angry altercation. 

The Emperor Constantine, who had become sole 
emperor A. D. 323, was honestly disgusted to find 
the new religion which he had adopted, and over 
which he had thrown the protecting aegis of his 
imperial power, already rent with violent contro- 
versy. He wrote a letter to the principal disputants 
assuring them that the matter in dispute was " of 
small or scarcely least importance," that " there was 
no unvarying standard of judgment," that the Scrip- 
ture passages on which the controversy turned were 
" inexplicable." It was a wise letter, but a drop of 
oil upon the raging Atlantic would not have less 
effect. The controversy waxed hotter and hotter 
until, in the spring of 325, the bishops of the church 
were summoned to meet in Mcsea and settle the 
dispute. This was the first (Ecumenical (meaning 
imperial) council; the first attempt to bring to- 
gether all the bishops of the church. The hand of 
Constantine was felt in every part of the arrange- 
ments. No modern senator ever subordinated a 
political convention to his will more perfectly than 
Constantine this convention of bishops, and, no 
modern delegates were ever more subservient to 
" the machine " than were these bishops to the im- 
perial will. They were many of them simple men, 
who had never seen an emperor before, and he did 
his best to dazzle them. It is probable that he 



THE DEIFICATION". 251 

could have got a majority for any creed that he 
might urge on the assembly ; but he was a shrewd 
man, and, instead of forcing the majority to come 
over to his side, he went over to the side of the 
majority. 

On his arrival at Nicsea he was immediately 
flooded with rolls of parchment, the letters of those 
days, each one detailing some personal grievance of 
this or that bishop. Indeed, to lay their personal 
grievances before the emperor seemed the only rea- 
son why the majority had come to the council. 
No sooner had the council been opened by the em- 
peror than the bishops filled the air with mutual 
accusations of all sorts of baseness, demanding of 
the emperor to right their various wrongs ; but he, 
ordering a brazier to be brought, made a burnt-offer- 
ing of all their parchments, and then read them a 
wholesome lesson on the duties of their office and 
the need of mutual forbearance. The theological 
controversy then began. The only argument re- 
corded is that of Nicholas of Myra, which was lit- 
erally " a knock-down argument," for he gave Arius 
such a blow in the jaw that this offending member 
must have been incapacitated for its legitimate 
functions for a time. His creed, however, was pro- 
duced and read to the assembly. A storm of dis- 
approbation greeted it and it wa's torn in fragments 
by the opposing party. Another creed, that of 
Eusebius of Caesarea, was read and disapproved 



252 THE MAN JESUS. 

and torn in pieces. To read this creed, though 
Eusebius was himself an Arian, any one would 
suppose that it might give satisfaction to the most 
orthodox. It had given satisfaction to the empe- 
ror, who, before the meeting of the council, had 
leaned undisguisedly to the Arian side; but the 
very fact that this creed was satisfactory to the 
Arians insured its condemnation by the opposite 
party. What this party wanted was a creed that 
Arius could not accept; and it was furnished them, 
or, at least, its crucial word, by one of the Arian 
party, Eusebius of Mcomedia, who declared that 
" to assert the Son to be uncreated would be to say 
that he was homoousian, that is, of one substance 
with the Father." Great was the excitement caused 
by this letter. It was torn in pieces, as the obnox- 
ious creeds had been before it, and then a creed 
was fashioned by the Athanasian party in which 
the word homoousian was embodied. So hateful to 
the Arians, it was just the word the Athanasians 
wanted. The creed, so far as it concerned the na- 
ture of Christ, affirmed belief in " one Lord, Jesus 
Christ, the Son of God, begotten of the Father ; 
only begotten, that is to say, of the substance of 
the Father; God of God, Light of Light, very God 
of very God, begotten not made, being of one sub- 
stance with the Father, by Whom all things were 
made, both things in heaven and things on earth." 
" But those that say, ' there was when he was not/ 



THE DEIFICATION. 253 

and c before he was begotten he was not/ and that 
'he came into existence froni what was not/ or 
who profess that the Son of God is of a different 
' person' or 'substance/ or that he is created, or 
changeable, or variable, are anathematized by the 
Catholic church." At once the emperor threw 
himself with his whole weight on the side of this 
statement. What he wanted was unanimity, and 
he cared little how it was gained. To Eusebius he 
privately confessed that he understood homoousian 
to mean homoiousian, — "of the same substance/' 
to mean " of like substance," and advised Eusebius 
to sign with this private understanding ! All of the 
Arian bishops, except some five or six, proved their 
subserviency and duplicity by following his example. 
Constantine, determined to do nothing by halves, 
issued a decree of banishment against all who re- 
fused to sign the creed ; denounced Arius and his 
disciples as impious, and ordered that he and his 
disciples should be called Porphyrians, and his 
books burned, under penalty of death to any one 
who perused them. 

Thus it was that Jesus was made God. It was 
the work of some three centuries, — this deification 
of the Man of Nazareth. Even now much remained 
in dispute concerning the nature of Christ. New 
controversies necessitated new councils. One was 
the Monophosite controversy : Had Christ two na- 
tures ? The answer was affirmative. Then came 



254 THE MAN JESUS. 

the Monothelite controversy: Had Christ two 
wills ? Again the answer was affirmative. The 
Nestorian controversy was mixed up with these: 
Was Mary to be called theotokos, the Mother of God ? 
Yes, answered the council of Ephesus ; at which 
the passions developed were so intense that one 
bishop felled another to the earth, and trampled 
him to death amid the sympathetic shoutings of 
the assailant's party. Arianism died hard ; it was 
the creed of the great Northern races that over- 
whelmed the Eoman empire ; but the decision of 
Nicaea was the beginning of the end, and it was 
the culmination of the process of Christ's deifica- 
tion. Further than that it was impossible for 
words to go in asserting the deity of Christ. I 
have no sympathy to waste on either party in this 
momentous struggle. The creeds of Arius and 
Athanasius are alike irrational to me, alike blasphe- 
mous in their garrulity concerning things of which 
no man has a right to speak. I have wearied you 
with their pretentious foolishness, only because it 
was necessary for me to do so in order to show you 
How Jesus was made God ; and this you have now 
seen. 

And having seen it, is not the course which we 
have travelled, let me ask you, a sufficient con- 
demnation of the goal to which we have arrived ? 
Is not the history of the development of the doc- 
trine of the deity of Christ all the refutation of this 



THE DEIFICATION. 255 

doctrine that any reasonable man should ask for or 
desire ? And what a commentary is this history 
upon the part which the doctrine of Christ's deity 
has played in Christendom for fifteen hundred 
years ! Everywhere this doctrine has been spoken 
of as if it were a direct revelation from the Al- 
mighty, and as such it has been claimed to be a 
mystery which it is impious for us to dare to criti- 
cise, or to try to fathom with our natural intelli- 
gence ; and what have we found to be the facts ? 
That within the limits of the New Testament this 
doctrine is nowhere distinctly taught ; that in those 
parts of the New Testament which embody the tra- 
ditional conception of Jesus, as it developed in the 
course of sixty to eighty years after his death, how- 
ever exaggerated in some particulars, is still the 
conception of Jesus as a purely human being. It 
is only in those parts of the New Testament where 
tradition gives place to free and daring speculation, 
that the human personality of Jesus is resolved 
into the fiery mist of metaphysical ideas; and 
still the leading Pauline conception of Jesus is as 
a heavenly archetypal man, and whether it is Paul 
or another 1 who resolves him into a cosmic princi- 
ple, the lines of difference and subordination are 
never blurred. In the Fourth Gospel, a magnificent 
tour de force, dating from the second quarter of the 
second century, the highest point of the New Tes- 
1 In Colossians and Philippians. 



256 THE MAN JESUS. 

tament development is reached, and it is still below 
the point of deity. Moreover we see this Gospel 
to have been only one of many second-century 
attempts to express an exalted conception of Je- 
sus in the terms of a fanciful and imaginative 
system of philosophy, the Neo-Platonism of Alex- 
andria. For two centuries after this attempt we find 
the doctrine of Christ's nature still a matter of 
free speculation; the speculation frequently of men 
as credulous, as fanciful, as irrational, as any that 
have contributed to the sum of human thought. 
We see the eagle of victory hovering uncertainly 
about the rival standards, not knowing upon which 
to perch. We see the orthodoxy of one period, the 
heterodoxy of another; and we see a word, " homo- 
ousian," branded in a synod of the third century as 
heretical, in the following century become the sym- 
bol par excellence of the orthodox faith. We see 
this symbol triumph in the council of Nicaea, in 
virtue of imperial manipulation, and in pursuance 
of the example of imperial duplicity, after it has 
come to the. surface of that wild waste* of theologi- 
cal and personal acrimony of which the council of 
Nicaea was the concrete expression. There are de- 
grees of human imperfection in this history of a 
doctrine's rise and growth, but where along its 
ever-widening course shall we look for any tribu- 
tary stream of supernatural influence or illumina- 
tion ? The Synoptic Gospels are an agglomeration 



THE DEIFICATION. 257 

of traditional elements, receiving their final editorial 
impress from we know not what hands. Nothing 
that Paul claims for himself, and nothing that his 
letters contain, demands for them any authoritative 
force over and above the intrinsic reasonableness of 
their ideas. His was a great mind entangled in 
the meshes of rabbinical interpretation and philos- 
ophy. We find him basing a stupendous argument 
upon the idiomatic use of a singular for a plural 
noun (seed for seeds) ; we find him constantly re- 
flecting the ideas of his time, and, in his individual 
speculations, rash, fanciful, imaginative to the last 
degree. The case of the Fourth Gospel is not dif- 
ferent. The doctrine of the Logos is here funda- 
mental ; and this, wildly fanciful in the Alexandrian 
schools, does not become any less so through being 
incorporated in a Christian Gospel. At this point 
we pass from the New Testament into the general 
thought of early Christendom for which the Protes- 
tant Christian claims no supernatural inspiration ; 
and the Eomanist claims it only because it is ex- 
tremely convenient, and indeed absolutely neces- 
sary for him to do so, not because anything in the 
order of events suggests such inspiration. The im- 
partial observer, looking back upon the early Chris- 
tian centuries, the centuries which completed the 
doctrine of the deity of Christ, sees that they had 
no immunity from the errors or the passions which 
beset the general course of history. He sees that 

17 



258 THE MAN JESUS. 

men of quite exceptional intellectual force were fet- 
tered by the imperfect philosophical systems of their 
time, and led astray by the then universal passion 
for fathoming the unfathomable mysteries of infi- 
nite being. He sees that many baser motives con- 
tributed to the final result, and that the men who 
constituted the council of Nicaea, including its im- 
perial head, were not such that infallibility is to be 
predicated of their thought or action ; and so I ask 
again, Is not the history of Christ's deification all 
the refutation of the doctrine that an intelligent 
and candid person should desire ? Yes, and what 
then ? Why, then the dignity and beauty of the 
human Jesus remain to us a heritage of incom- 
parable worth; and for the rest — "our sufficiency is 
of God," the One Infinite and Eternal, whose power 
and wisdom and beneficence need nothing supple- 
mentary ; whose nature is so unapproachable that 
the exaltation of any other being into special rela- 
tionship with him, to say nothing of equality or 
unity, is reverent of such a being only at the cost 
of a much deeper reverence for "his Father and 
our Father, his God and our God." 



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